iron

[Rajesh Kochhar]

Ref L S Cousins and Narayan Joshi

1.Iron was required to clear the rain forests of the north Indian plains. The method was to burn down the trees and axe out the rumps. Since the Harappan tradition and the following  pre-PGW tradition  had the same technological capabilities, they occupied the same territory, avoiding mighty rivers and keeping to semi-arid areas.Thus the  beginning of large-scale inhabitation of the ganga plain is circumstantially related to iron metallurgy.

2. It is rather misleading to say that 500 or 2300 years were required to perfect a technology. Technological innovations/advancements come in bursts.They are then standardized and frozen. 500 years correspond to 20 generations. No  material evolutionary process can continue that long.

3.Rgveda is not a gazetteer. It was not composed so that later generations wiould have a reference book.It  does not mention salt, although the salt range falls within the Rgvedic territory.If the dog barked,it was there.But if it did not bark,it is difficult to say if only the bark was missing or the dog itself.To say that a thing existed in the Rgvedic time,even though it is not explicitly mentioned,one must adduce indirect evidence or plausibility arguments.

rajesh kochhar