An Ancient Southern Civilisation

Recent archaeological discoveries in the Tamirabarani river valley have pushed back the earliest date for the emergence of a complex civilisation in the region to near 1200 BCE

- Amarnath K. Menon

ON

August 27, Ramalingam Sivanantham, Tamil Nadu’s commissioner for archaeology, found himself floored by a report by the Miami-based Beta Analytic Testing Laboratory, which had performed a radiocarbon dating of the contents of a burial urn recovered from a dig in Sivagalai, in the state’s Thoothukudi district. The report concluded that the contents of the urn—including rice and soil—dated back to 1155 BCE, indicating that an agrarian civilisation was flourishing in Tamil Nadu at that time. The news travelled quickly up the ranks—Sivanatham shared the report with Tamil Nadu archaeology advisor Prof K. Rajan, who passed it on to the state’s minister for archaeology Thangam Thennarasu, who informed Chief Minister M.K. Stalin.

The findings were kept under wraps until Stalin revealed them in the state legislative assembly on September 9. “The findings have established that the Porunai (today’s Tamirabarani) river civilisation dates back 3,200 years,” he said. “It is the government’s task to scientifically prove that the history of the Indian sub-continent should begin from the Tamil landscape.” This, and other findings at several sites across the state (see Heritage Hotspots and Telling Finds) over the past two decades, are throwing light on a history that has in many ways been eclipsed by the better-known Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) sites in the northwest.