September 1924. This was based on D.R. Sahni’s work at harappa between 1920 and 1921 and rakal d. banerji’s work at Mohenjo Daro between 1921 and 1922. It was Mohenjo Daro that received major attention, because a large section of the ruins at Harappa were destroyed by the brick-robbing activities of the contractors of the Lahore-Multan railway. The results of work at Harappa were published in 1940. However it was the three-volume Mohenjodaro and the Indus Civilization, edited by Marshall and including a long introduction and discussion by him on religion and art, chronology, and the like, that brought out the first integrated image of this civilization. Its town planning, its concern with water supply and sanitation, its excellently crafted glyptic art and well-ordered rows of short inscriptions on seals, the evidence of its internal and external trade, a distinct level of technological excellence, and an art and a religious system whose principal elements were carried into the later historic periods—all of these suggested to Marshall a strong factor of continuity between this Bronze Age civilization and modern India. The discovery of this unique civilization, as unique in its own way as the civilizations of Egypt, was a great achievement of the Archaeological Survey of India under Marshall. With independence in 1947, India, in the eyes of western scholarship, became part of the Third World. But Marshall never had the compulsion to denigrate India’s unique antiquity, believing that the origins of historic India, including its major religion, Hinduism, could be traced back to the Bronze Age Indus civilization.

During the world Depression in the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s, archaeology survived somehow in India, although its budget was severely cut. N.G. Majumdar’s surveys in Sind elucidating the antecedents and transformations of Indus civilization and the excavations by K.N. Dikshit at the major Buddhist monastery of Paharpur in eastern India belong to this period. In 1939 the government of India decided, for unexplained reasons, to seek the opinion of the famous British archaeologist leonard woolley of ur on the state of Indian archaeology. The resultant “Woolley Report,” no worse and no better than many such pontificatory reports on India by Western experts, suggested, among other things, prolonged excavations at a major historic site for “in-service” training of the survey officers and the appointment of another famous British archaeologist, sir eric mortimer wheeler, as the director general for four years.

Mortimer Wheeler (1944–1948)

Wheeler knew the value of vertical sequences established on the basis of layers, he appreciated archaeology as an academic discipline in its own right, and he fully understood the potential of the application of natural-scientific techniques in archaeology. His work at Taxila, where he operated a training school for survey recruits and university students, and at Harappa, Arikamedu, and Brahmagiri were exercises both in stratigraphic layer-based digging and in pursuing specific issues. In retrospect Wheeler’s contribution to Indian archaeology lay in his determination to develop archaeology as an academic discipline in Indian universities, and this overall concern is obvious in his own writings during his stay in India in an annual publication he himself created, Ancient India. From the Indian academic point of view “he was no Elizabethan hero or a ‘mad sahib’ set among the natives to stampede them into a frenetic albeit well-ordered archaeological activity.... His role in India was basically that of a university teacher with firm, single-minded commitment to his subject” (Chakrabarti 1988a).

Prehistory until 1947

Until Wheeler organized a prehistory section in the survey, there was no official interest in prehistory, which had a checkered history of investigations in India since the early years of the twentieth century. During the second half of the nineteenth century, especially after the discovery of a hand-axe near Madras by Geological Survey of India officer robert b. foote, there were many prehistoric discoveries that were initiated almost exclusively by geologists. In 1923 an Indian teacher of anthropology at Calcutta University (Mitra 1923) published a book called Prehistoric India. In the 1930s, in the wake of stone tool discoveries in the outer Himalayan