Painted Grey Ware culture

The Painted Grey Ware culture (PGW) is conventionally dated 1200 to 500 BCE. ==Overview==

) - 1000-600 BCE. Government Museum, Mathura and Radhakund, Uttar Pradesh, and Panipat and Tilpat, Haryana. British Museum. , Punjab. s (after EIEC). The Andronovo, BMAC and Yaz cultures have often been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations. The GGC (Swat), Cemetery H, Copper Hoard and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo-Aryan migrations. The PGW culture cultivated rice, wheat, millet and barley, and domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses. Houses were built of wattle-and-daub, mud, or bricks, ranging in size from small huts to large houses with many rooms. There is a clear settlement hierarchy, with a few central towns that stand out amongst numerous small villages. Some sites, including Jakhera in Uttar Pradesh, demonstrate a “fairly evolved, proto-urban or semi-urban stage” of this culture, with evidence of social organization and trade, including ornaments of gold, copper, ivory, and semi-precious stones, storage bins for surplus grain, stone weights, paved streets, water channels and embankments. The plough was used for cultivation. There are also indications of growing complexity of society as population increased and the size and number of settlements multiplied. Arts and crafts of the PGW people are represented by ornaments (made from terracotta, stone, faience, and glass), human and animal figurines (made from terracotta) as well as "incised terracotta discs with decorated edges and geometric motifs" which probably had "ritual meaning," perhaps representing symbols of deities. There are a few stamp seals with geometric designs but no inscription, contrasting with both the prior Harappan seals and the subsequent Brahmi-inscribed seals of the Northern Black Polished Ware culture. At Bhagwanpura in the Kurukshetra district of Haryana, excavations have revealed an overlap between the late Harappan and Painted Grey Ware cultures, large houses that may have been elite residences, and fired bricks that may have been used in Vedic altars. Among the largest sites is also the recently excavated Ahichatra, with at least 40 hectares of area in PGW times along with evidence of early construction of the fortification which goes back to PGW levels. Towards the end of the period, many of the PGW settlements grew into the large towns and cities of the Northern Black Polished Ware period. ==Interpretations==

The pottery style of this culture is different from the pottery of the Iranian Plateau and Afghanistan (Bryant 2001). In some sites, PGW pottery and Late Harappan pottery are contemporaneous. The archaeologist Jim Shaffer (1984:84-85) has noted that "at present, the archaeological record indicates no cultural discontinuities separating Painted Grey Ware from the indigenous protohistoric culture." However, the continuity of pottery styles may be explained by the fact that pottery was generally made by indigenous craftsmen even after the Indo-Aryan migration. According to Chakrabarti (1968) and other scholars, the origins of the subsistence patterns (e.g. rice use) and most other characteristics of the Painted Grey Ware culture are in eastern India or even Southeast Asia. == Recent Archaeology ==

In 2015, two periods of PGW were identified, at Ahichhatra, the earliest from to 800 BCE, and the late from 800 to 400 BCE. In 2014, the PGW horizon of Kampil excavations were published as 2310 ± 120 BCE and 1360 ± 90 BCE by archaeologist D.P. Tewari. In 2013, further excavations at Alamgirpur, near Delhi, revealed contiguous occupation of the site, from Early Harappan, through Mature Harappan, Late Harappan, and into a period overlap between the later part of the Harappan phase (with a "noticeable slow decline in quality") and the earliest PGW levels; a sample of beans and grains from this transition layer (ZB 26 OxA-21882) offered a radiocarbon dating of 3659 ± 31 years BP (1647 BCE). In 2009, a team of the Archaeological Survey of India led by B.R. Mani and Vinay Kumar Gupta collected charcoal samples from the spoil of an illegally excavated, government protected mound at Gosna, a site 6 km east of Mathura across the Yamuna river, where two of the radiocarbon dates came out to be 2160 BCE and 2170 BCE, the site may have had a plain or painted grey ware association, but the evidence has been lost. ==See also==