Kaytha or Kayatha is a village and an archaeological site in the

Ujjain district Ujjain district is a district of Madhya Pradesh state in central India. The historic city of Ujjain is the district headquarters. The district has an area of 6,091 km², and a population of 19,86,864 (2011 census), a 16.12% increase from it ...

Madhya Pradesh Madhya Pradesh (, ; meaning 'central province') is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal, and the largest city is Indore, with Jabalpur, Ujjain, Gwalior, Sagar, and Rewa being the other major cities. Madhya Pradesh is the seco ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, in the

Tarana ''Tarana'' is a type of composition in Hindustani classical vocal music in which certain words (e.g. "odani", "todani", "tadeem" and "yalali") based on Persian and Arabic phonemes are rendered at a medium (''madhya laya'') or fast (''drut laya'' ...

tehsil A tehsil (, also known as tahsil, taluka, or taluk) is a local unit of administrative division in some countries of South Asia. It is a subdistrict of the area within a district including the designated populated place that serves as its administ ...

, near the city of Ujjain, on the banks of Choti-Kali Sindh river. In 1964, V. S. Wakankar discovered the archeologically important Kayatha culture here, dating back to more than 4000 years.

Archaeology

Several

Chalcolithic The Copper Age, also called the Chalcolithic (; from grc-gre, χαλκός ''khalkós'', "copper" and ''líthos'', "stone") or (A)eneolithic (from Latin '' aeneus'' "of copper"), is an archaeological period characterized by regular ...

sites, with four occupational phases, have been discovered in the

Malwa Malwa is a historical region of west-central India occupying a plateau of volcanic origin. Geologically, the Malwa Plateau generally refers to the volcanic upland north of the Vindhya Range. Politically and administratively, it is also syn ...

region of central India. The site at Kayatha, situated on the right bank of the Choti Kali Sindh river (a tributary of Chambal river), is the

type site In archaeology, a type site is the site used to define a particular archaeological culture or other typological unit, which is often named after it. For example, discoveries at La Tène and Hallstatt led scholars to divide the European Iron A ...

of this culture, known as "Kayatha culture". Excavations conducted by V. S. Wakankar (1965–66), and by M. K. Dhavalikar and Z. D. Ansari (1968) revealed layers from five different periods: # Period I: Kayatha culture # Period II: Ahar culture # Period III:

Malwa culture The Malwa culture was a Chalcolithic archaeological culture which existed in the Malwa region of Central India and parts of Maharashtra in the Deccan Peninsula. It is mainly dated to BCE, but calibrated radiocarbon dates have suggested that the b ...

# Period IV: Early historical culture # Period V: Sunga-Kushan-Gupta culture Of these, period I to III are

. There are four C-14 dated from period I and three from period III giving a range from 2000 BC to 1200 BC to the Chalcolithic culture at Kayatha. The Kayatha culture represents the earliest known agriculture settlement in the present-day Malwa region. It also featured advanced copper metallurgy and stone blade industry. Using

calibrated In measurement technology and metrology, calibration is the comparison of measurement values delivered by a device under test with those of a calibration standard of known accuracy. Such a standard could be another measurement device of known ...

radiocarbon, Dhavalikar dated this culture to a period spanning from 2400 BCE to 2000 BCE. However, calibrated dates by

Gregory Possehl Gregory Louis Possehl (July 21, 1941 – October 8, 2011) was a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and curator of the Asian Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. ...

place it between 2200 BCE and 2000 BCE. Excavation at Kayatha in 1964-65, revealed the Kayatha culture dates much earlier than the Malwa culture. An interesting aspect is that the earliest occupants used triangular terracota cake-like objects, stone weights, buff ware etc. Depictions of bull, deer, panther and elephants have been discovered later. Interestingly, a clay figure of horse has also been discovered. Also of archeological and anthropological significance is the parallel between the bull forms from Kayatha and south European sites. Though not much is known about the religious practices of the Kayatha culture but it is suggested that they must have been in contact with OCP people in North and the Harappans.

Demographics

According to the 2011 census of India, Kaytha has a population of 8040, including 4143 males and 3897 females. The sex ratio of the village is 955. The effective literacy rate (excluding children below 6) is 70.5%.

References

{{reflist Villages of Ujjain district Archaeological sites in Madhya Pradesh History of Malwa