Artillery in 1827. In the southern part of the country there was a period of “barrow-hunting,” when megalithic burials of various kinds were dug in their hundreds by British officials in the cool of the Nilgiri hills or literally in their backyards. At Jiwarji in the Deccan, Captain Meadows Taylor (1851) in his digging employed more care and precision than others. On the north Indian plains some major historical sites were identified or recorded during this period, the foremost coming from alexander cunningham, a military engineer and a close associate of Prinsep. In the newly translated itineraries of the two famous Chinese pilgrims to India—Fa-Hian (early fifth century a.d.) and Hiuen-Tsang (the first half of the seventh century a.d.)—he found an important geographical base for conducting ground investigations. One could follow the pilgrims in their travels and mark out the places they reported. In 1843 he discovered the location of the early historic city-site of Sankisa in Uttar Pradesh by following this method (Cunningham 1843), but systematic surveys had to wait until 1861 when the government established an organization for the purpose, with Cunningham (then retired with the rank of Major General) at its head. In 1865 the Archaeological Survey of India was disbanded, to be reorganized in 1871 with Cunningham again in charge, this time with the services of two assistants, J.D. Beglar and A.C.L. Carlyle. Beglar left this job in 1880 and was succeeded by H.B.W. Garrick.

The Surveys of Alexander Cunningham (1861–1865, 1866–1885)

Cunningham conducted his surveys across the entire area between the northwestern hills and the Bengal delta, including the Vindhyan orbit in central India, eastern Rajasthan, the Chhotanagpur hills, and Orissa in eastern India. Some of the work was done by his assistants but the principal work was done by Cunningham personally. The results of these surveys were incorporated in twenty-three volumes published between 1871 and 1887 (Imam 1966).

The standard features of a Cunningham report are the following: a ground survey studying the height, character and extent of the mounds, including their structural features and the plans and measurements of the more important of them; the record of their local traditions; the mention, if any, of the place in the ancient Indian literary texts; the description in Hiuen-Tsang’s and/or Fa-Hian’s records; an attempt to identify the various sacred spots, monasteries, stupas, etc. in Hiuen-Tsang’s and Fa-Hian’s account of the place with the various surviving features on the ground; and the mention of the still available coins, images and inscriptions at the place with notes on them. To do all these even in the context of a single site would require a strong measure of versatile scholarship and practiced eyes. What lends Cunningham’s survey work great distinction is that he could set down these points for hundreds of sites of different types throughout north India.

(Chakrabarti 1988a, 59)

The basic achievement of these surveys was the mapping out of sites on a large scale and this was something like the achievement of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, which mapped out the Indian landmass in considerable detail.

Archaeology as Architecture (1885–1901)

There was a sharp contrast in archaeological attitude between Alexander Cunningham and his successor James Burgess (1886–1889), who had considerable prior experience as an architectural surveyor in Gujarat and the Deccan and to whom archaeology was nothing but architectural study (Burgess 1905). The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the publication of many studies of ancient and medieval monuments, principally by “provincial” surveyors, such as James Fergusson and R.L. Mitraand, under Burgess, and some by Burgess himself. At the same time the study of ancient Indian epigraphy was undertaken by a specially appointed government epigraphist and a curator of ancient monuments, to which Captain H.H. Cole (1880–1883) was appointed. This marked a departure from the earlier government attitude, reflected by its resolution to auction the Taj Mahal for the value of the marble of its construction—a resolution mercifully abandoned later. One of the significant field-archaeological