<p>In July this year, a 10-year-old girl was cutting the overgrown grass in front of her ‘kutcha’ house in the Thingalur forest in Tamil Nadu’s Erode district bordering Karnataka. As she was working, she heard her pick axe hitting metal inside the ground. She tried again and heard a similar sound. She went and complained to her grandmother that something metallic was blocking her pickaxe. <br /><br />It did not take much time to the old woman to realise that her granddaughter had struck literally one of those pots gold that her ancestors used to talk about. She could not hide her excitement and the word spread quickly in the hamlet of nine families.<br /><br />The residents soon realised the ‘gold coins’ in their hands were much more than mere bullion. That single pot contained 744 small gold coins, each weighing 40 gm. A State Archaeology official has dated them to the Vijayanagara era, according Shanmugham, the local Sathyamangalam tahsildar who retrieved the coins and deposited them in the Government Treasury. Initial scrutiny dates the coins to possibly the erstwhile Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan’s period. <br /><br />“It is a very rare find,” Shanmugham told Deccan Herald. Similar gold coins were unearthed from the same hamlet, Kotamala, way back in 1974, where a fort believed to have been built by Krishnadevaraya now lay in complete ruins, he explained to back his claim. <br /><br />Understandably, the nine families’ privy to the find, initially shared the coins among themselves. Later, on the Panchayat chief’s advice, they parted with their ‘treasure’, he said. What enhanced their archaeological value are symbols of ‘Mudhumakatthazhi’ (large earthen jars in which corpses, usually of the old were interred in ancient times) and ‘Tiger’, noticed on the Gold coins.<br /><br />For the Roman poet Virgil, such find of gold may be have provided good grist for a didactic poem on farming. But in Tamil Nadu, it is only the latest in a series of historically significant and exciting new findings in recent months, lighting up the State’s archaeological landscape. <br /><br />Call it quirk of fate or the harbinger of an ‘archaeological spring’ in the run-up to two major politico-cultural events this year, the First World Classical Tamil Conference (WCTC) held at Coimbatore in June and the forthcoming September celebration of the 1000th year of the construction of the ‘Big Temple’ in Thanjavur by King Raja Raja Chola, the big bang came in May 2010, say both State and Central Archaeology Department officials. <br />In one of the rarest archaeological finds in several decades, 84 copper plates, all meticulously strung around a two feet diameter copper ring and embossed with Chola emblems, were unearthed in an old Shiva shrine, the Kailasanathar Temple (dated to 11th or 12th CE), in Tiruindalur village near Mayiladuthurai in Nagapattinam district, when the restoration of the temple. <br /><br /></p>.<p>R Nagaswamy, former State Director of Archaeology, termed the copper plates, later displayed at the WCTC exhibition, as “a fantastic discovery and the find of the century”, even as epigraphists are now deciphering its text - in a mix of Granth and Tamil Brahmi scripts. Along with them, 12 amazing bronze icons for which the Cholas were famous were also discovered. Around the same time, some 200 km northwards, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) came up with an “extensive cluster of megalithic monuments of Iron Age period datable around 2500-2600 BP,” at Sengalur near Tiruchirappalli, said D Dayalan, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai, leading a massive project to comprehensively document all the 110 cave temples in Tamil Nadu. <br />While mapping two 8 CE cave temples in that area, Dayalan’s team excavated six to seven old burial sites in their vicinity in a bid to understand the socio-economic conditions of that region. These documentations were for the first time done with ‘GPS coordinates’, while the site itself yielded over 500 ‘megalithic monuments’. <br /><br />Stone circles, cist burials of different types and urn burials are among the incredible yields. Large numbers of different-size potteries, terracotta figurines, bangles and hundreds of beads in glass and semi-precious stones have made the Sengaulur finds exceptionally unique in South India. They also stumbled on pot shards with ‘graffiti marks’ in Sengalur which “very much tallies with the graffiti marks in Harappa,” Dayalan noted. <br />These indicate a possible ancient link between Dravidian culture and the Indus Valley Civilisation, though more sustained work has to be done. And thanks to the Big Temple’s millennium celebrations, the ASI has also taken up conservation of the ‘moat’ around it. <br /><br />“We will be first giving a facelift to the monument on the eastern side (by September 25),” says Sathyabhama Bhadrinath, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle.<br />Significantly, NGOs have also pitched in to take up restoration of hundreds of old temples that are in a sad state of neglect across Tamil Nadu. The 1,200-year old ‘Kailasanatha Temple’ at Uttaramerur, about 90 km from Chennai, which had almost crumbled, has now been miraculously restored to its original form by the efforts of an NGO, ‘Rural Education and Conservation of Heritage Foundation (REACH)’. <br /><br />It was possible with a deft mix of traditional artisan skills, old construction materials and new civil engineering techniques “to stitch cracks on stone pillars” by IIT-Madras, says Chandrasekhar of ‘REACH’, flagging a new revival for archeology and epigraphy in the State.</p>
<p>In July this year, a 10-year-old girl was cutting the overgrown grass in front of her ‘kutcha’ house in the Thingalur forest in Tamil Nadu’s Erode district bordering Karnataka. As she was working, she heard her pick axe hitting metal inside the ground. She tried again and heard a similar sound. She went and complained to her grandmother that something metallic was blocking her pickaxe. <br /><br />It did not take much time to the old woman to realise that her granddaughter had struck literally one of those pots gold that her ancestors used to talk about. She could not hide her excitement and the word spread quickly in the hamlet of nine families.<br /><br />The residents soon realised the ‘gold coins’ in their hands were much more than mere bullion. That single pot contained 744 small gold coins, each weighing 40 gm. A State Archaeology official has dated them to the Vijayanagara era, according Shanmugham, the local Sathyamangalam tahsildar who retrieved the coins and deposited them in the Government Treasury. Initial scrutiny dates the coins to possibly the erstwhile Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan’s period. <br /><br />“It is a very rare find,” Shanmugham told Deccan Herald. Similar gold coins were unearthed from the same hamlet, Kotamala, way back in 1974, where a fort believed to have been built by Krishnadevaraya now lay in complete ruins, he explained to back his claim. <br /><br />Understandably, the nine families’ privy to the find, initially shared the coins among themselves. Later, on the Panchayat chief’s advice, they parted with their ‘treasure’, he said. What enhanced their archaeological value are symbols of ‘Mudhumakatthazhi’ (large earthen jars in which corpses, usually of the old were interred in ancient times) and ‘Tiger’, noticed on the Gold coins.<br /><br />For the Roman poet Virgil, such find of gold may be have provided good grist for a didactic poem on farming. But in Tamil Nadu, it is only the latest in a series of historically significant and exciting new findings in recent months, lighting up the State’s archaeological landscape. <br /><br />Call it quirk of fate or the harbinger of an ‘archaeological spring’ in the run-up to two major politico-cultural events this year, the First World Classical Tamil Conference (WCTC) held at Coimbatore in June and the forthcoming September celebration of the 1000th year of the construction of the ‘Big Temple’ in Thanjavur by King Raja Raja Chola, the big bang came in May 2010, say both State and Central Archaeology Department officials. <br />In one of the rarest archaeological finds in several decades, 84 copper plates, all meticulously strung around a two feet diameter copper ring and embossed with Chola emblems, were unearthed in an old Shiva shrine, the Kailasanathar Temple (dated to 11th or 12th CE), in Tiruindalur village near Mayiladuthurai in Nagapattinam district, when the restoration of the temple. <br /><br /></p>.<p>R Nagaswamy, former State Director of Archaeology, termed the copper plates, later displayed at the WCTC exhibition, as “a fantastic discovery and the find of the century”, even as epigraphists are now deciphering its text - in a mix of Granth and Tamil Brahmi scripts. Along with them, 12 amazing bronze icons for which the Cholas were famous were also discovered. Around the same time, some 200 km northwards, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) came up with an “extensive cluster of megalithic monuments of Iron Age period datable around 2500-2600 BP,” at Sengalur near Tiruchirappalli, said D Dayalan, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai, leading a massive project to comprehensively document all the 110 cave temples in Tamil Nadu. <br />While mapping two 8 CE cave temples in that area, Dayalan’s team excavated six to seven old burial sites in their vicinity in a bid to understand the socio-economic conditions of that region. These documentations were for the first time done with ‘GPS coordinates’, while the site itself yielded over 500 ‘megalithic monuments’. <br /><br />Stone circles, cist burials of different types and urn burials are among the incredible yields. Large numbers of different-size potteries, terracotta figurines, bangles and hundreds of beads in glass and semi-precious stones have made the Sengaulur finds exceptionally unique in South India. They also stumbled on pot shards with ‘graffiti marks’ in Sengalur which “very much tallies with the graffiti marks in Harappa,” Dayalan noted. <br />These indicate a possible ancient link between Dravidian culture and the Indus Valley Civilisation, though more sustained work has to be done. And thanks to the Big Temple’s millennium celebrations, the ASI has also taken up conservation of the ‘moat’ around it. <br /><br />“We will be first giving a facelift to the monument on the eastern side (by September 25),” says Sathyabhama Bhadrinath, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle.<br />Significantly, NGOs have also pitched in to take up restoration of hundreds of old temples that are in a sad state of neglect across Tamil Nadu. The 1,200-year old ‘Kailasanatha Temple’ at Uttaramerur, about 90 km from Chennai, which had almost crumbled, has now been miraculously restored to its original form by the efforts of an NGO, ‘Rural Education and Conservation of Heritage Foundation (REACH)’. <br /><br />It was possible with a deft mix of traditional artisan skills, old construction materials and new civil engineering techniques “to stitch cracks on stone pillars” by IIT-Madras, says Chandrasekhar of ‘REACH’, flagging a new revival for archeology and epigraphy in the State.</p>
