A Plea for a Prehistoric Survey of Southern India

Abstract

ACCORDING to Mr. R. Bruce Foote, and no one is more competent to speak than he, the urgency for the establishment of a genuine prehistoric survey in Southern India is very great, if the study of this most fascinating branch of archæology is to be encouraged and the wanton destruction of prehistoric monuments checked. Such survey, if honestly carried out, would go far to procure much larger data than yet exist as to the distribution over the southernmost districts of the peninsula of the Palæolithic people whose remains in the shape of chipped stone implements have been found in so many localities in the Carnatic and Deccan plateau, embedded in Pleistocene deposits. Such data might help materially also to bridge over the great hiatus in time which now appears to exist between the era of those very rude people and that of the Neolithic tribes which followed them in the same country.