- HOMEGROWN WORLD
- #HGCREATORS
- #HGEXPLORE
- #HGVOICES
- #HGSHOP
- CAREERS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
"The Iron Age began on Tamil soil."
With these words, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin sought to rewrite the history of India and the world's Iron Age civilisations in front of a gathering of academics, archaeologists, and experts at the Anna Centenary Library on January 23, 2025. Beyond political theatrics, his statement was backed by an 80-page report titled 'Antiquity of Iron: Recent Radiometric Dates from Tamil Nadu' based on rigorous research and analysis done by a team of archaeologists and experts from the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and various universities across the country.
What exactly did Mr Stalin mean by his statement?
The Tamil Nadu government had been hinting at this recent discovery for weeks leading up to the announcement. Over the last five years, archaeological excavations in several sites across the South Indian state have turned up fascinating evidence of iron smelting which predates the global onset of the Iron Age by several centuries.
The first site that produced an earlier Iron Age chronology was Mangadu in the Salem district. An iron sword from a disturbed burial chamber at Mangadu, located in the Mettur taluk, yielded dates between circa 1604 and 1416 BCE, with circa 1510 BCE as the mean value. After this, other sites at Sivagalai, Adhichanallur, and Mayiladumparai were excavated in 2021.
At Mayiladumparai, the excavations revealed several significant artefacts including small flint spear and arrowheads, later Stone Age bevelled-edge cutting tools, tool-polishing grooves, iron objects, and Iron Age burials. The site also yielded several important pottery types such as Black and Red Ware and Iron tools. The samples, taken from depths of 120 cm and 140 cm, were located near Neolithic polishing grooves and rock art. The AMS C14 (Accelerated Mass Spectrometry of the radioactive Carbon 14 isotope) dating of two samples provided dates of circa 1615 BCE and 2172 BCE, respectively.
At the same time, the Iron Age habitational mound at Adhichanallur, and the burial mounds and habitational mounds at the adjacent Sivagalai site unearthed several iron objects dated to between 2983 BCE and 3345 BCE using the Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating technique.
All of these sites point to the existence of iron objects as early as 2500 BCE in Tamil Nadu, which predates earlier estimations of the Iron Age beginning around 1200 BCE in India. This is what Mr Stalin was referring to in his announcement. These discoveries point to the possibility that while civilisations elsewhere were still in the later Bronze Age, South Indians were smelting iron and making iron objects.
Despite several yet-answered questions about how this development affected trade and cultural exchange between Bronze Age and Iron Age societies in the region, and how history is not as linear as we once thought, these discoveries represent a turning point in how we think and write about civilisation in India.
