A Source-Book Of Indian Archaeology, Vol. III: Human Remains, Prehistoric Roots Of Religious Beliefs, First Steps In Historical Archaeology: Sculpture, Architecture, Coins And Inscripts

This volume, the third and final part of A Source-book of Indian Archaeology, takes one to the tentative beginnings of Indian sculptural, architectural, numismatic and inscriptional studies and tries to give an idea of what has been generally achieved in the fields of human skeletal discoveries, rock-art and religion. The articles chosen for the first section will give a feel of how it all began: how were some of the classical sculptural and architectural sites of the subcontinent approached and described and what was Prinsep’s chain of reasoning when he was studying the early Indian coins or grappling with the decipherment of Asokan inscriptions? Our intention was only to draw attention to the basic foundations of these sub-disciplines. A consideration of their later developments was not within our focus. For the rest of the topics, we decided to remain content with a limited number of essays which played a role in shaping these themes. Taken together, the three volumes of A Source-book of Indian Archaeology offer a definitive historical perspective of Indian archaeology through a selection of astonishingly wide-ranging but integrated body of sources up to the 1980s