nine Neanderthal adults and children, but there is a strong sequence exemplifying technological evolution from the Mousterian (between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago) through to Upper Paleolithic industries dating to about 25,000 years ago. Most attention has been focused on the Neanderthal skeletons, one of which shows evidence of a disabling disease from which the individual must have suffered for a considerable time before death. The prolonged care this individual received has been taken as evidence of the social bonds existing among Neanderthals. Some researchers have also claimed that flowers were placed in one of the burials—an indication, according to some interpretations, of sentiment among these people. Although the claim has been disputed, novelists have nonetheless readily incorporated this notion in their imaginative reconstructions of everyday life among the Neanderthals.

Tim Murray

See also

Mesopotamia

Reference

Trinkaus, E. 1983. The Shanidar Neandertals. New York: Academic Press.

Sharma, Govardhan Rai

(1919–1986)

Govardhan Rai Sharma was one of the most effective university teachers of archaeology in postindependence India. He built up a strong tradition of field research in the Department of Ancient History and Archaeology at Allahabad University, where he served throughout his working life. His early years were spent excavating the historic city site of Kausambi, in northern India, on which he published two major excavation reports (Sharma 1960, 1969).

However, his work in the fields of prehistory and proto-history in the neighboring Vindhyan Hills brought him more prominence in Indian archaeology. The easternmost section of the Vindhyas touches the Gangetic Plain near Allahabad, and although the prehistoric potential of the region had been known since the nineteenth century, it was Sharma who rigorously built up a section profile from the Acheulean to the Mesolithic Periods and excavated a number of what he called “advanced Mesolithic” sites both there and in the Pratapgarh area of the adjacent plain. At the site of Koldihawa in the same area, he found evidence of cultivated rice in the context of sixth–fifth millennia b.c. (Sharma et al. 1980). Between Varanasi and Allahabad, especially in the Mirzapur section of that stretch, he found a large number of Megalithic burials and painted rock shelters in association with microliths. Finally, in collaboration with j. desmond clark of Berkeley, Sharma extended his prehistoric sequence up to the Son Valley in Madhya Pradesh (Sharma and Clark 1983).

Sharma had a strong personality, which did not make him popular with his colleagues (some of whom disputed his claims after his death), but the field team he built up in Allahabad is unquestionably among the best in India.

D. Chakrabarti

See also

South Asia

References

Sharma, G. R 1960. The Excavations at Kausambi. Allahabad, India: Department of Ancient History, Culture, and Archaeology, University of Allahabad.

———. 1969. Excavations at Kausambi 1949–50. Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India no. 74. Delhi: Manager of Publications.

Sharma, G. R., and D. Clark. 1983. Palaeoenvironments and Prehistory in the Middle Son Valley. Allahabad, India: Abinash.

Sharma, G. R., V.D. Misra, D. Mandal, B.B. Misra, and J.N. Pal. 1980. Beginnings of Agriculture. Allahabad, India: Abinash.

Shaw, Charles Thurstan

(1914– )

One of the pioneers of West African archaeology, Charles Thurstan Shaw, or Thurstan Shaw as he has always preferred to be known, was born on 27 June 1914 in Plymouth, England. Shaw was educated at Blundell’s School in Tiverton, England, and Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge, where his main archaeological teachers were Miles Burkitt and grahame clark. In 1937, Shaw joined the staff of Achimota College in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), then one of the nearest things to a university in sub-Saharan Africa. There, in addition to his teaching duties, he was in charge of the Anthropology Museum at the college and found time to conduct archaeological