University of Allahabad

Department of Ancient History, Culture and Archaeology of the University of Allahabad, one of the four oldest universities in India, were carved out of the Department of History in May 1955. From then onwards the Department has grown steadily focusing on archaeology, socio-economic history, religion and philosophy, art and architecture and ancient Indian polity. The Department was the first university department in India to receive a license to undertake archaeological excavations from Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India. It started with Kaushambi, a centrally protected site, in 1948 under the direction of a young faculty, Sri G.R. Sharma. The extensive excavations carried out at the site threw significant light on the archaeology of the Ganga valley with special reference to the urban revolution posterior to that of the Harappan civilization.

The explorations and excavations carried out in the Vindhyas since mid-sixties, especially in the valleys of the rivers Belan and Sons and their tributaries, have broadened the canvas of archaeological studies in space and time. For the first tithe a complete and uninterrupted sequence from the early- Paleolithic to- the Neolithic, described as ‘Text Book Section’, was established in these river valleys. The excavations carried out in the Vindhyas and the Ganga valley threw significant light on the Mesolithic cultures of the region (yielding the largest number of human skeletons) as well as the earliest evidence (seventh millennium B.C.E.) of rice cultivation in the world at the Neolithic sites of Koldihwa, Mahagara,Tokwa, Hetapatti and Jhusi.

The last site-overlooking the holy confluence of rivers at Allahabad, identified with Pratishthana of the Vedic-Puranic fame, occupies a rare place in the history of India as it has revealed the uninterrupted cultural sequence from the 8th millennium B.C.E. to the medieval period. The works done by the Department in history and pre-history of the Vidhya-Gangeya region drew world-wide attention. A joint project between the Academy of Sciences, USSR and the Department was launched in 1980. The Department also entered into a collaborative research with a team of archaeologists, anthropologists and geomorphologists under the leadership of Desmond Clark of USA and carried out pre-historic investigations in the middle Sone valley, Sidhi district of M.P.