Communities in stone: Translating from artefact clusters, topography and structure to cultures in the everyday in Jharkhand

It has always been difficult for archaeologists to transfer their impressions of any site to isolating and identifying communities that lived within these sites. All these problems were compounded when earlier archaeologists, while analyzing the personality of India, proclaimed that the Eastern Indian region was almost an ‘area of isolation’, or ‘terra incognita’. This meant that not much was known about the archaeology of these regions. Central, Southern, Western and Northern India have had large sites in the primary context which have been excavated. However, Eastern India had very few such sites (such as Paisra). In spite of the number of archaeological finds and comparing what is known of eastern India today with what is known of the rest of India, it may still be called ‘terra incognita’.Subsequent researches have proven the earlier analysis of the personality of India to some extent even while the answers to major issues remain tantalizingly out-of-reach. The Jharkhand region, hived from the earlier Bihar and the even earlier Bengal region, has become a mass of data, with many sites but few ideas regarding the communities that once lived there.Jharkhand is part of the Chotanagpur region, with its 600 m average height plateaus, bordered by a series of waterfalls and watered by a number of rivers. Almost 1300 sites dot the entire area of Bihar and the Chotanagpur region. They occur from all periods of time though very few of them are in the primary context. Most of the sites are surface finds and the context and embedding soil seems to have either worn away or not sufficiently able to give reliable results relating to dating. The region delivers its secrets very sparsely. None of the sites can be shown as a marker that may give us an idea of the entire region.This paper argues that the data cannot be interpreted in a unitary manner. The logic of the site/s may be seen from the fact that different communities/groups have been living in the region. They have not only had different cultures but the same group has had minor differences from region to region and different exploitative strategies in different seasons. This is why the clues left are seemingly so diverse and difficult to unravel. This paper explores the nature of these clues in their ecological and topographical contexts to illustrate this issue.