Rock Art of India: Suitable Dating Techniques
Contents: 1. Introduction/Bansi Lal Malla. 2. Relativity of the Absolute: Dating Indian Rock Art/N. Chandramouli. 3. Recent Advances in Dating Rock Art of Prehistoric Southern India/Ravi Korisettar. 4. Suitable Method for Dating Indian Rock Art: Picture Analysis and Their Distribution/A. Sundara. 5. Principles of a New Proposed Pigment Trace Element Method for Dating Indian Rock Art/Somnath Chakraverty. 6. Dating of Artistic Depictions in Rock Shelters: Some Issues/R.C. Agrawal. 7. Relative and Absolute Dating of Indian Rock Art: With Reference to the Recent Findings in Central India/Kantikumar A. Pawar and Shaik Saleem. 8. Suitable Dating Techniques for Indian Rock Art/G.L. Badam. 9. Absolute Dating of a Time Marker from the Satpuras: An Appraisal through Uranium Series for Central Indian Rock Art/Ruman Banerjee and Somnath Chakraverty. 10. The Quantitative Dating of the Rock Art/C.M. Nautiyal. 11. Some Key Aspects of Rock Art Dating/Bansi Lal Malla. Index.
Rock art is a vital archaeological source to study and analyse the cognitive evolution of the human intellect across the world. The importance of rock art and its dating has long been a key issue of rock-art research and continues to be attended by difficulties about methodology, misinterpretation of findings and overconfidence in the reliability or precision of results. Most of the rock-art researchers’ primary focus in their investigations for rock-art dating at present has been to establish chronologies of different rock-art sites.
The present volume mainly emphasizes on long due and much discussed issues like that of what will be the suitable dating techniques for Indian rock art. Some of the topics in the volume cover different dating methods such as the minimum dating by archaeological excavation, radiocarbon analyses of mineral accretions or their inclusions, radiocarbon analyses of paint residues or their inclusions, geomorphological methods, minimum or maximum ages derived from biological accretions, lichenometry, colorimetry of patinae, radiocarbon analyses of charcoal and beeswax figures, and any other methods of ‘direct’ dating of rock art. This volume includes not only new insights but also new dating results. The data and interpretations put forward by various scholars are comprehensive and analytical. Most of their views are appropriate and hold promise in terms of recent trends in dating rock art.
