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(1923–1982)
P. C. Dasgupta was primarily an art historian interested in the early historic terracottas and later sculptures of West Bengal before he was made the director of the West Bengal State Directorate of Archaeology and Museums in Calcutta in the early 1960s. His subsequent career is an excellent example of how important a role even amateurs can perform in modern archaeology, especially in the Third World, by their sheer enthusiasm.
Stone Age sites had been known in West Bengal before, but the number of discoveries Dasgupta made in this field far outstripped any significant work done earlier. One of his sites, Susunia, is undoubtedly the only major primary Acheulian site in eastern India, rich in both faunal and lithic remains. Interestingly, his amateurism meant that he was instrumental in preventing the full potential of the site from being realized because he employed a large number of workmen to only pick up artifacts. Neolithic-Chalcolithic sites were well understood in many other parts of India by 1960, but nothing was known of them in West Bengal. Dasgupta soothed regional pride by finding a large number of them over a wide area, and although he did not do justice to the major site he excavated in this context, that of Pandu Rajar Dhibi, his report (Dasgupta 1964) was for many years the only definitive publication on the stratigraphy of such a site in West Bengal.
Dasgupta’s department soon built up what was to become the largest archaeological collection from Bengal. The museum that was established after he had retired in the late 1970s reflects his enormous enthusiasm and support for Bengal archaeology, and those who work in the region will always feel indebted to him.
References
Dasgupta, P. C. 1964. Excavations at Pandu Rajar Dhabi. Calcutta.
Establishing the age of objects, landscapes, or contexts is one of the primary tasks of the archaeologist. It has also proved to be among the most difficult. Archaeology’s twin roots in the humanities and in sciences such as geology and paleontology provided two types of answers to the question, how old? Although antiquarians, historians, and philosophers long pondered the history of people before writing, it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the discipline of archaeology was able to make great strides in developing reliable means of assigning age and chronological relationship.
From the humanities, particularly through the study of material culture, archaeologists have developed schemes of relative dating based on the close analysis of the forms and functions of artifacts. In this endeavor strong links with classification (taxonomy) and typology were forged that depended on the development of consistent rules for describing artifacts and the contexts in which they were found. The earliest relative chronologies, such as the three-age system, were founded upon description, taxonomy, and the development of typology. But in the absence of a means to establish relative age, such classifications and typologies were, in essence, ahistorical and potentially circular in their logical forms.
Geology and paleontology provided the basis of a solution. The principle of relative dating (that is, establishing that one thing is relatively older or younger than another thing) was based on the notion of stratigraphy. In this sense it was understood that following the law of superposition (by which what is on the top is assumed to be younger than what is on the bottom), the relative ages of artifacts could be established on the basis of their relative positions within a stratigraphic profile. Advances in the degree to which antiquarians and archaeologists in the nineteenth century understood the principles of stratigraphy (and site formation) were matched by an increasing sophistication in the ways in which they were able to apply them.
The work of Scandinavian archaeologists such as jens jacob worsaae, sophus müller, and oscar montelius and Egyptologists such as w. m. flinders petrie was particularly significant in the development of the relative-dating technique of seriation. These advancements were supported by painstaking research into the
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