Indian Prehistory II: The Neolithic and the Consequences of Food Production — Settlement, Population, Craft Specialisation, Class and Political Institutions — the Sites from Burzahom and Gufkral through the Chalcolithic Villages of Ahar, Gilund, Kayatha, Navdatoli, Daimabad and Inamgaon to Maski, Brahmagiri, Sanganakallu, Tekkalakota, Piklihal, Nagarjunakonda, Kuchai, Daojali Hading and Sarutaru, and the Prehistoric Cave Art of Bhimbetka and Adamgarh

Food production — the cultivation of domesticated plants and the herding of domesticated animals — changed human life more than any event since the control of fire, and the syllabus lists the consequences the discipline has traced. Settlement: farming ties people to fields and stored harvests, so the mobile band gives way to the permanent village of mud, wattle-and-daub or stone houses, with storage pits and bins, granaries, threshing floors and cattle pens; villages then differ in size and form a hierarchy, as in the Deccan Chalcolithic, where a regional centre such as Daimabad (about 20 hectares) stood above villages of a few hectares and hamlets below them. Population growth: sedentism shortens birth spacing (mothers no longer carry infants on long moves, and cereal gruels allow earlier weaning), stored food buffers lean seasons, and children become useful labour in fields and herds, so fertility rises; skeletons also show the costs — dental caries from starchy diets, anaemia, infectious disease in crowded villages — which is why the "Neolithic demographic transition" brought more people but not always healthier ones. Craft specialisation: a surplus lets some people spend part or all of their time on crafts — potters (and the potter's wheel), copper-smiths who smelt and cast, bead-makers in carnelian and agate, lime-makers, weavers — and the crafts are often located in separate quarters, as at Inamgaon. Class formation: control of land, cattle, stored grain and exchange creates differences of wealth and rank, visible in house size, position in the settlement and grave goods; at Inamgaon the largest house, at the centre of the village by a granary, and a burial in a four-legged urn beneath it have been read as the residence and grave of a chief. Political institutions: with rank come authority over the allocation of land and water, the organisation of communal works (Inamgaon's embankment and channel on the Ghod, fortifications at Eran, Gilund and Balathal), dispute settlement and relations with other villages — the chiefdom stage of Elman Service's band–tribe–chiefdom–state sequence (Unit VII), on the road to the state. Childe called the whole package the "Neolithic Revolution"; it did not happen at once, and in India foraging, herding and farming coexisted for millennia.

The Kashmir Neolithic, on the karewa terraces of the valley, is distinct from every other Indian Neolithic. Burzahom, about 16 km north-east of Srinagar, first noticed by de Terra and Paterson in 1935, was excavated by T.N. Khazanchi of the Archaeological Survey in 1960–71; its Neolithic, from about 3000 to 1700 BCE, began with pit dwellings — circular or oval pits up to about 4 metres deep, narrow at the top and wide at the base, entered by steps or a ladder, with post-holes round the rim for a conical roof of birch or thatch, read as protection against the valley's winter cold — and later moved to houses built at ground level of mud and mud-brick. The people used polished stone axes and a remarkable bone industry of harpoons, needles, awls and arrowheads, and a rectangular stone "harvester" pierced with holes that resembles the reaping knives of northern China; they buried their dead under the floors, sometimes with domestic dogs, and some skulls show trepanation. An engraved stone slab shows a hunting scene under two suns, and a pot painted with a horned figure in the Kot Diji style and carnelian beads point to contact with the early Harappan world. Gufkral ("potter's cave"), near Tral in Pulwama district, excavated by A.K. Sharma of the Archaeological Survey in 1981, has an aceramic first phase (IA) with pit dwellings, domestic sheep, goat and cattle, and wheat, barley and lentil — agriculture before pottery — followed by phases with coarse and then burnished grey pottery. In the east, Kuchai in the Mayurbhanj district of Odisha (excavated by B.K. Thapar in 1961–62) has polished celts, shouldered celts, ring stones and cord-impressed pottery, and Chirand in Bihar on the Ganga has a Neolithic rich in bone tools with rice. In the north-east, Daojali Hading in the Dima Hasao (North Cachar) hills of Assam, excavated by M.C. Goswami and T.C. Sharma of Gauhati University in 1961–63, and Sarutaru (the syllabus's "Sarutadu") near Guwahati in Kamrup district, have ground and polished shouldered celts and rounded-butt axes of stone including jadeite, grinding stones, and cord-marked pottery, with affinities to the Neolithic of South-East Asia and southern China; the shouldered celt is the north-east's type tool. Dates for the north-east are not secure; a range of the second millennium BCE or later is usual.

The Neolithic of the southern Deccan — northern Karnataka and western Andhra Pradesh — from about 3000 to 1200 BCE is a culture of granite hills, black-soil plains and cattle. Its hallmark is the ash mound: great heaps of vitrified ash on hilltops and in valleys, which F.R. Allchin showed at Utnur (1957) to be the burnt accumulations of cattle dung from stockades where herds were penned, burnt periodically perhaps in seasonal rituals like the modern Deepavali and Sankranti cattle festivals. Its people lived in circular huts of wattle and daub on stone foundations on terraced hillsides, made ground and polished axes of dolerite and basalt with pointed butts, blades of chert, and grey burnished handmade pottery, kept humped cattle, sheep and goat, grew millets and pulses (horse gram, green gram, finger millet appearing later), buried their dead extended or in urns within the settlement, and bruised pictures of cattle on the rocks. Brahmagiri in Chitradurga district, near an Asokan edict, was excavated by Mortimer Wheeler in 1947, who established the southern sequence there: a Stone Axe (Neolithic) culture, then a Megalithic culture, then the Andhra (early historic) period. Maski in Raichur district, where the edict first giving the name "Devanampiya Asoka" was found in 1915, was excavated by B.K. Thapar in 1954 and has Neolithic–Chalcolithic, Megalithic and early historic levels. Sanganakallu near Bellary (Ballari), worked by B. Subbarao and later by Z.D. Ansari and M.S. Nagaraja Rao, has a long Neolithic with an earlier blade phase. Tekkalakota, also in Bellary district, excavated by M.S. Nagaraja Rao and K.C. Malhotra in 1963–64, has circular huts, extended and urn burials and, unusually, gold ornaments. Piklihal in Raichur district, studied by Allchin in 1951–52, gave rock bruisings of humped cattle and hill-top cattle pens. Nagarjunakonda in the Krishna valley of Andhra Pradesh, excavated before the Nagarjunasagar dam drowned it (1954–60), has a Neolithic with polished axes, pit dwellings and burials beneath its Megalithic and later Ikshvaku and Buddhist remains. Hallur in Dharwad and Utnur and Budihal in the ash-mound country complete the picture; Budihal has a cattle-butchering floor.

Outside the Harappan area, from about 3000 to 700 BCE, farming villages that used copper alongside a blade industry spread across Rajasthan, Malwa and the Deccan in a series of regional cultures, each named after a type site and recognised by its painted pottery. The Ahar or Banas culture of south-eastern Rajasthan, named from Ahar near Udaipur (excavated by R.C. Agrawala in the 1950s and by H.D. Sankalia in 1961–62), used white-painted black-and-red ware and smelted local copper — Ahar's name in the region was Tambavati, "the place of copper" — in stone-footed houses; Gilund, on the Banas in Rajsamand district (B.B. Lal, 1959–60; Gregory Possehl and Vasant Shinde, 1999–2005), is a larger Ahar–Banas site with mud-brick walls and clay sealings, and Balathal near Udaipur has a fortification of the third millennium BCE. The Kayatha culture of Malwa, named from Kayatha near Ujjain (V.S. Wakankar, 1964; Z.D. Ansari and M.K. Dhavalikar, 1968), about 2400–2000 BCE, has a sturdy chocolate-slipped pottery, copper axes and bangles. The Malwa culture (about 1800–1400 BCE), with a buff-slipped pottery painted in black, was defined at Navdatoli, opposite Maheshwar on the Narmada (Sankalia, 1957–59), where wheat, barley, lentil and other pulses were grown and houses were round and rectangular; Nagda on the Chambal (N.R. Banerjee, 1955–57) and Eran in Sagar district on the Bina (K.D. Bajpai, 1960s), with a Chalcolithic mud rampart and moat, belong to the same Malwa zone. The Jorwe culture of Maharashtra (about 1400–700 BCE), named from Jorwe on the Pravara, with a red pottery painted in black and a distinctive spouted vessel, is the Deccan's: Nevasa (Sankalia's excavations), Chandoli near Pune (S.B. Deo and Z.D. Ansari), Daimabad on the Pravara in Ahmednagar district, Inamgaon on the Ghod in Pune district and Prakash on the Tapi in Nandurbar district (B.K. Thapar, 1955) are its sites. Daimabad (excavated by M.N. Deshpande in 1958–59 and S.A. Sali in 1976–79) runs from a Savalda phase through a late Harappan phase to Malwa and Jorwe, grew to about 20 hectares, and is famous for a hoard of four solid bronzes — a chariot with a rider drawn by two oxen, a rhinoceros, an elephant and a buffalo — found by a farmer in 1974, whose date (late Harappan or later) is argued. Inamgaon, excavated by Sankalia, Ansari and Dhavalikar for Deccan College between 1968 and 1982, is the best-studied village in Indian prehistory: its Malwa, Early Jorwe and Late Jorwe phases show a village of about a hundred to a hundred and thirty houses, crops of barley, wheat, lentil, pulses and rice, an embankment and channel diverting the Ghod's flood water, specialist craftsmen at the edge of the settlement, children buried in pairs of urns under the house floors, a chief's large house and granary at the centre, and, in Late Jorwe, a decline into poverty as the climate grew drier.

India has one of the world's great concentrations of rock art, most of it painted in the sandstone shelters of the Vindhyas, Satpuras and Kaimur hills of central India. The first Indian rock paintings were reported by Archibald Carlleyle in the Kaimur hills of Mirzapur in 1867–68; the shelters of Bhimbetka in Raisen district, found by V.S. Wakankar in 1957, are the largest and best-studied group, with paintings in several hundred of their some 750 shelters, and were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Studies by Wakankar, Yashodhar Mathpal and others place the paintings in a sequence of periods by superimposition, style and subject: a few early paintings in green and dark red of large animals are attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic; the great majority are Mesolithic — hunting of bison, deer, boar and rhinoceros by men with bows and barbed spears, trapping, fishing, honey collection with ladders, dancing in lines and circles, mothers and children, burials, and animals drawn in outline, filled with geometric patterns or in "X-ray" style with internal organs shown; then Chalcolithic scenes of contact with farmers, with pottery and domestic animals; then early historic scenes of riders on horses and elephants with swords and shields, battles and processions, sometimes with inscriptions; and finally medieval motifs. The colours are mineral: red and brown from haematite and ochre (geru), white from lime and kaolin, yellow from limonite, green from a green earth, mixed with water, animal fat or plant gum and applied with fingers or twig brushes. Adamgarh, the group of shelters on a hill near Hoshangabad (Narmadapuram) on the Narmada, excavated by R.V. Joshi in 1964 for its Mesolithic deposits, also has paintings of hunting scenes, animals (deer, elephant, rhinoceros) and later of riders with horses, and the same sequence of Mesolithic to historic styles. Rock art is read anthropologically in two ways, both with caution: as a record of economy and daily life, checked against the excavated deposits in the same shelters, and as the expression of belief — hunting magic, fertility, initiation, shamanic trance — read by analogy with the art and ritual of central Indian tribal communities such as the Saura, whose ritual wall paintings (idital) are made to this day, and the Warli and the Gond.