The Proto and Early Historical Cultures of Ap

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It gives me great pleasure to preface this book by Dr. Krishna Sastry. In the first place, the book is welcome because we hardly have any work worth the name in the country on regional archaeology. Secondly, the work is penned by no less person than one who has been at the helm of archaeological matters in Andhra Pradesh, and who has been very active in the field. What we have, therefore, is an authoritative work by a field archaeologist, who has a first-hand knowledge of the evidence. The book is therefore doubly welcome.

European countries have had a long tradition of regional archaeology. The late Sir Mortimer Wheeler had long back underlined the need to introduce regional approach in Indian archaeology and he had then referred to the excellent work done in Britain. But his advice probably fell on deaf ears and nothing was done here. Of late, however, a couple of works in regional art and archaeology have been published, but they deal more with art than with archaeology. The regional archaeology is thus, for the first time, receiving due attention, and that too in Andhra Pradesh, a state which is one of the richest so far as the archaeological potential is considered. Let me, therefore, congratulate Dr. Krishna Sastry for producing this work on the archaeology of Andhra Pradesh, more particularly of the Karimnagar region which is located on the north, on the borders of Maharashtra.

Although most of the states in the country have their own departments of archaeology, only a few are carrying out field research. In this respect, Andhra Pradesh, which comprises mostly the erstwhile state of Hyderabad, has a long tradition on archaeological research pioneered by the late Dr. Ghulam Yazdani. And it is heartening to see that the same tradition is now being maintained by Dr. Krishna Sastry, who has carried out intensive explorations and has also conducted some interesting excavations in the state.

In this book Dr. Krishna Sastry, after discussing the natural setting and the palaeolithic cultures, describes the life style of the first farmers of Andhra Pradesh. The region is singularly rich in neolithic habitation sites of which there are two groups viz., the hill sites and the surface sites. The first settlers located their habitations on the top of the granitoid hills. Besides these, there is the problem of the Ash Mounds which also belong to the neolithic period.

Dr. V.V. Krishna Sastry is a digger. When applied to an archaeo- logist the term "Digger" or even "Grave Digger", is notably derogatory; on the contrary, it is an apt description of what he is and should be.

Only a great digger can be a great archaeologist. To unearth the buried past to unravel the tangled history, and to make the dead peoples and their cultures reveal for us, he has to use his spade extensively, and he has to use it with knowledge and skill, with zeal and imagination. In the process, he has to open up graves, uncover cists, scoop out temples, excavate forts together with their gates and moats, locate cave dwellings, discover village sites and other places of human habitation and do a hundred and one other things of a similar nature. And as he descends tier by tier deeper into the site he is digging, he should collect every object that turns up from the scrapers and blades, the stone axes and arrow-heads, the pot sherds, beads and terracottas of the most primitive man to the crown and sceptre, the throne and footstool of the mightiest emperor. Each thrust of his spade should indeed be a peep into the eras which have long ended, into ages which have utterly vanished. So to call himself a digger is and should be a matter of pride to an archaeologist. Small wonder, then, that one of the greatest archaeologists, SIR MORTIMER WHEELER entitled his autobiography "STILL DIGGING".

While every archaeologist is a digger, a few are by far more successful than the rest. Their distinction cannot be wholly attributed to their genius and zeal; there is also an element of luck. The life stories of almost all archaeologists of world stature show that luck did play a decisive part in their careers.

I have been closely following the work of Dr. Krishna Sastry during the past few years. Apart from his high talents and utter dedication to his work, I am able to discern in his case that elusive element of luck favouring him time and again. As the Director of Archaeology, Andhra Pradesh, he has, I believe, unearthed more history in the course of the past two or three years than what some of his predecessors did in as many decades.