Abstract

When A.C L. Carlleyle, in 1883, chanced upon Indian microliths in the Vindhyan region of the Mirzapur district, he did not know what these small stone tools were. Interestingly, it was conjectured that these tools were made by pygmy people—an “unrecognised” human population—who made these “pygmy flints”. Later in the 19th century, it was established that microliths originated in India and these tools travelled towards the west from India. Various theories were made to classify microliths, and lastly, they were recognised as part of a culture that came between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, i.e., the Mesolithic, a term proposed by Hodder Westropp in 1872. Since Carlleyle’s use of the term Mesolithic, defining this period in the Indian continent became prevalent. Consequently, since the mid-1800s, microliths were reported from all over India by British explorers and geographers. The 1900s witnessed the revisits to these sites by various scholars to find the “Mesolithic” culture in India. Post independence, for decades now the research has still been carried out along the same lines, and every microlithic occurrence is labelled as a “Mesolithic” site. The tapestry of the Indian Mesolithic has been weaved with the threads by colonial researchers, which, however, seems to be fraying with the contemporary archaeological evidence with respect to microliths in the 21st century. In this talk, we will dwell upon the critical questions that demand attention to the plight of Indian microliths where these microlithic-making hunter-foragers were boxed within the confines of the “Mesolithic period”.