ANNUAL REPORT OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF INDIA 1921-22

The author has made a noble attempt to unearth the ASI Report in this volume. It is unfortunate that the editing of this Report should have devolved, owing to the absence on leave of Sir John Marshall, Director General of Archaeology in India, upon the present writer, as it is the first of the few consolidated reports. Sir John was able to revise practically all the contributions sent in for the Conservation Section of the Report, and to arrange the plates; otherwise the editorial responsibility rests upon the undersigned and Elaldston, though all concerned would have preferred that Sir John’s riper experience should have moulded the new form throughout. Ever since the re-organisation of the Department in 1902, it has been the rule for each Provincial Superintendent to issue an independent Annual Progress Report for the Circle of which he is in charge, the Director General’s Report then summarising the year’s work as a whole, and recording particulars of his own activities. So long as each Province bore the cost of its own Archaeological work, this arrangement was inevitable, but it necessarily involved a considerable amount of repetition and duplication of effort. Now that Archaeology is centralised under the Reforms, and the entire cost is borne by the Imperial Government, it has seemed best to do away with the Provincial Reports, and to issue instead one joint or consolidated Report for the Archaeological Survey as a whole. This joint Report is naturally made up of the contributions received from the several Circles, put together under the editorship of the Director General, who, in normal years, will also contribute a record of his own work during the year. This volume is profusely illustrated to make it presentable to the researchers.