Littoral States should join hands to unearth common maritime past: historian
The Hindu
‘Baruch in Gujarat to Tamluk in Bengal hold the key to understanding significance of Muziris’
It will be a great step in unearthing a common maritime history of the Indian subcontinent, if south Indian and littoral States from Gujarat to West Bengal joined hands to promote archaeological studies of the early historic period (5th century BC to 5th century AD), said P.J. Cherian, director, PAMA Institute for the Advancement of Transdisciplinary Archaeological Sciences, a non-profit research organisation which is spearheading the Pattanam excavations. This is because the host of port sites of this phase, from Barygaza (Baruch) in Gujarat to Tamralipti (Tamluk) in Bengal, hold the key to understanding how Muciri Pattinam (which foreigners referred to as Muziris) emerged as the first emporium of the Indian Ocean, having contacts from Gibraltar to south China, 18 centuries before Vasco da Gama’s landing on the Kerala coast. Such collaborative effort and conservation of the archaeological, genetic and philological evidence emerging from the coastal belt of the Indian subcontinent may even provide alternative historical readings that could challenge the dominant colonial historiography, he added. His comments come against the backdrop of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin’s recent statement that the Porunai river (Thamirabarani) civilization is 3,200 years old, after carbon dating analysis of rice with soil, found in a burial urn at Sivakalai in Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu, by Miami-based Beta Analytic Testing Laboratory, yielded the date of 1155 BC.More Related News