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region, H. de Terra, a geologist from Yale, and T.T. Paterson, an archaeologist from Cambridge (England) formulated a scheme of river terrace successions associated with lithic industries in the Soan River Valley of Panjab (now in Pakistan). The Soan terraces were related to the evidence of four glacial phases in Kashmir, which in turn were related to the four-fold glacial cycle in the Alps, thus bringing a sense of geochronology to Indian prehistoric studies. This work enjoyed influence for a long time and generated further interest in prehistoric studies in different parts of the country. In the 1940s stuart piggott, then in the Royal Air Force in India, studied protohistoric material from Baluchistan, arranging it into regional cultures with ties to central and west Asia. But on the whole prehistoric and protohistoric studies had to wait for an upsurge in interest until the postcolonial era.
After 1947, the year of Partition and Independence from British rule, the history of South Asian archaeology becomes the history of archaeological research in five nation-states: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
There are no positive reports of early sites in Bhutan, and to the best of our knowledge there has been no detailed survey work either. The Himalayan kingdom of Nepal, on the other hand, has an established government archaeology department, complemented by archaeology and ancient history teaching at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu. Considering the nature of sites in the Kathmandu valley and the tarai region of the country, the orientation of Nepalese archaeology has always been toward sites associated with the life of the Buddha and generally Buddhism (for a comprehensive survey, see Slusser 1982; for a representative excavation report, see Mitra 1971). At one point there was a great reluctance to come to terms with the fact that the site of Kapilavastu, the capital of the kingdom where the Buddha’s father was king, was, as the discovery of Kapilavastu monastic seals by an Indian team showed, at Piphrawa on the Indian side of the Nepal-India border (Rijal 1979). The birthplace of the Buddha has always been, of course, on the Nepalese side of the border. The standard archaeological publication of Nepal is Ancient Nepal, officially published by the government department of archaeology.
Bangladesh became an independent nation state in 1971 and archaeological research there between 1947 and 1971 was conducted by the Pakistan Department of Archaeology. The principal sites are the Buddhist monastery of Mainamati, which had its heyday in the seventh and eighth centuries a.d., and Mahasthangarh, one of the most imposing early historic city-sites of the subcontinent, dating back certainly to the third century b.c. when it was a provincial administrative center of the Mauryan empire, which stretched from south Afghanistan to Bengal. Buddhist monastery sites remain the focal point of contemporary Bangladesh archaeological research. Among its official publications Bangladesh Archaeology, of which regrettably only one issue has been published, must be considered the most important. Archaeology is taught at only one Bangladesh university, Jahangirnagar University near the nation’s capital of Dhaka. The only evidence of Stone Age industry in Bangladesh is a late Acheulean/Upper Paleolithic industry made from the locally abundant fossilwood in the Lalmai hills (Chakrabarti 1993).
Archaeology in Pakistan has concentrated on protohistory and on the elucidation of the process of cultural development leading up to the development of Indus civilization. Initially Baluchistan received close archaeological scrutiny, notably with the beginning of a new phase of protohistoric research in this area by W.A. Fairservis, who was soon followed by a host of other researchers, notably B. de Cardi, G.F. Dales, and, more recently, J. Jarrige, who established the beginning of wheat-barley and cattle-sheep-goat domestication at around 7000 b.c. in the Bolan Valley site of Mehrgarh. From the point of view of subcontinental archaeology, the discovery of this level at Mehrgarh was a
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