Page:Origin and spread of the Tamils.djvu/30



AUTHORS OF EARLY TAMIL CULTURE 19 yielded palaeoliths, the Alicoor hills were the chief centre. The neolithic people are those who used the black trap rocks for which the Deccan is justly famous. The light coloured quartzites did not attract them. Besides the new material of trappean rocks was tough and tenacious. Foote's collection contained over a thousand specimens of neoliths. In his classification, he came upon 78 distinct artifacts of which 41 belonged to the polished variety and the remainder 37 unpolished (Plate 3). Coloured pottery has come into use, as also coloured stones, eg, emerald green amazon stone, felspar. The Neolithic Age is succeeded in South India by the Iron Age 29 as in Crete, Greece, and many other western countries. The neolithic ancestors have come across iron and they found it more durable and tougher than the trappoid rock. Hence the find of Iron Age pottery on the old neolithic village sites. South India did not take to Bronze or Copper Age while their compatriots in the Indus regions were chalcolithic peoples. Probably the art of making alloys was learnt in the later Iron Age as a consequence of contact with the bronze and copper cultures. This means the early Iron Age must be fixed earlier than the 4th millennium B.C. To this early Iron Age belongs shell bangles (Plate 42). From the large number of iron weapons and tools and a sound knowledge of iron smelting, Professor Gowland, the well known metallurgist and explorer of the Japanese Islands, has expressed the opinion that the smelting of iron may have been hit