Urn-burial site found at Adichanallur tirunelveli

Urn-burial site found at Adichanallur By T.S. Subramanian ADICHANALLUR: (Tamil Nadu) An urn-burial site that dates back to 1000 B.C. is under excavation at Adichanallur, 24 km from Tirunelveli town in Tamil Nadu. The Archaelogical Survey of India (ASI), Chennai Circle, resumed digging there on February 8 after a gap of 100 years. So far, 20 urns, painted pot sherds, black ware and red ware have been unearthed. The burial site is adjacent to a lake on a huge mound on the southern bank of the Tamiraparani. T. Satyamurthy, Superintending Archaeologist and Director of the excavation at Adichanallur, said: "The pottery found near the urns date back to the megalithic period of 1,000 B.C. to 1st century A.D... followed by the early historic period which continued up to 6th century A.D." By custom, after the body is cremated, the bones are put in an urn. Often, the body was thrown to the elements or buried, the bones collected/exhumed later and interred in an urn. The mouth of the urn is covered by inverting another urn over it. This is called a "twin-pot" and such twin-pots have been unearthed at Adichanallur. Dr. Satyamurthy said that the urns found at the site conformed to the description of the ritual in Tamil Sangam literature — that an urn is inverted over another urn, that there are pots around and so on. For instance, there are descriptions of urn-burial in the Tamil epic, Manimekhalai, which belongs to the last period of the Sangam epoch. Earlier, Sangam works such as Natrinai, Paditrupattu andPurananuru give elaborate descriptions of this custom. When this reporter visited the site on March 2, excavation was under way. Workers were carefully digging the trenches, gingerly using chisels, or brushing away the earth found on the artefacts. Urns were jutting out of the earth here and there. Smaller pots were strung all round some of the urns. G. Thirumoorthy and M. Nambirajan, assistant archaeologists, and P. Aravazhi, research scholar, are guiding the excavation. According to Mr. Thirumoorthy and Mr. Nambirajan, the small pots strung around the urns would have contained the personal objects of the dead person such as ornaments, weapons or offerings like paddy or grains. "If we get grains, it will be useful for dating," they said. Among the artefacts discovered are hundreds of pot sherds with beautiful designs and graffiti, superbly-crafted pot spouts, tiered knobs to be fitted into the pot's lid, black ware, red ware, and black and red ware. One pot sherd had a twisted rope-like design running on it. Mr. Satyamurthy said: "So, we have pot sherds which may date back to 1000 B.C. When we scoop out the urns intact, we may get some organic material such as bones, wood or charcoal which can be dated even prior to 1000 B.C. Their date could be fixed using the Carbon-14 dating method. Another methodology was the archaeo-magnetic method, by which the curvature of the site was measured and this was used to determine the age of the pottery. "Once the date of the pottery is known, we will know the date of the site." The amateur British archaeologist, Alexander Rea, excavated the Adichanallur site for a few years from 1900. In his article, Prehistoric Antiquities in Tinnevelly, published in the ASI's Annual Report 1902-1903, Mr. Rea called the "Adittanallur" site "the most extensive prehistoric site as yet discovered in southern if not in the whole of India." "It covers an area of 114 acres, within which burial urns were found, at some places close together, and at others more widely apart. This site was first brought to notice in 1876, when it was visited by Dr. Jagor of Berlin." According to Mr. Rea, several thousand objects found at the burial site/inside the urns included finely made pottery, iron implements and weapons, vessels and ornaments in bronze, gold diadems, bones, stone beads, "some household stone implements used for grinding curry or sandalwood," traces of cloth and wood and mica. "Husks of rice and millet were found in quite a large number of pots inside the urns." The aim of the present excavation is to examine the site thoroughly, bring out its chronology and give a scientific date to it using the C-14 or archaeo-magnetic method. Another aim was to find out whether there was a habitational site nearby. "For burial sites generally formed part of the habitational sites," said Mr. Satyamurthy. Interestingly, the Adichanallur site was found near a lake just as the urn-burial site at Mangadu in Kollam district, Kerala, was found by the Ashtamudi Lake. "I did the excavation in Mangadu, where similar urn-burials were found. But the burials found at Adichanallur show the trend of an earlier phase, such as coarse pottery and hand-made pottery. So the date of Adichanallur may even be earlier than that of Mangadu," that is prior to 1000 B.C., he said.