In Keeladi dig, artefacts, history, heritage and politics

KEELADI: One day in April, Periya Ganesan started work, the same way he had for the previous four days, sifting through the sediment and dirt in his assigned trench at the dig site

- Divya Chandrababu

It was tiring but significant work, the brass tacks that archaeology is built on but rarely spoken of in the final telling of discovery. Like some of the others on the site, this was Ganesan's ninth year at the dig. Like every year, work started in early April this year.

At 9.30am on that day, April 10, he saw a flash of white. It was right below the surface. It looked hard. It looked like a floor. Ganesan ran to archaeological officer Ajay Kumar, and told him something was different. Kumar knew Ganesan was not lying. The workers at the dig site were well versed with the topography. The senior officer descended the trench and started digging. Soon, it became ever clearer that Ganesan was not mistaken. Underneath, there was something white and firm; a mixture of clay and lime, over 2,000 years old. Kumar's eyes widened. "It even looked like a modern concrete floor."

In 2015, excavations began in the town of Keeladi, around 500 kilometres away from Chennai, after carbon dating samples from the area were traced back to 580 BCE, suggesting that similar to the "second urbanisation" in the Gangetic plains, there was a civilisation that exi Keeladi, and Sivakalai (172 km away) between 2,600 and 3,200 years ago. It narrowed the gap between the imaginations of the Tamil and the Indus Valley Civilisations (3300 BCE to 1300 BCE), the earliest known in the Indian subcontinent.

Since 2015, for several months every year close to a dozen archaeologists and labourers of, first, the Archaeological Society of India till 2018 and then the Tamil Nadu government have been digging a 110acre area of what was once a coconut farm. Less than six acres have been excavated thus far.