Sankarjang (20°52’08“N; 84°59’19“E),

Odisha Odisha (), formerly Orissa (List of renamed places in India, the official name until 2011), is a States and union territories of India, state located in East India, Eastern India. It is the List of states and union territories of India by ar ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

is an archaeological site near

Angul Angul (also known as Anugul) is a city, municipality and the headquarters of Angul district in the state of Odisha, India. Angul has an average elevation of above sea level and total area of 6232 km2. Geography Angul is located at . I ...

, a former cemetery and settlement with large, worked stones but no one knows what they were made for, although some people think they might have been part of a lithophone . This site was test excavated by the State Archaeology Department of Odisha after a chance find of 20 long unfinished chipped and ground, lithic bars and axes of basalt, together with human skeletal remains and metallic artifacts, by a shepherd in 1971. Archaeologists understood ground stone lithics to be typical of the

Neolithic Period The Neolithic or New Stone Age (from Greek 'new' and 'stone') is an archaeological period, the final division of the Stone Age in Mesopotamia, Asia, Europe and Africa (c. 10,000 BCE to c. 2,000 BCE). It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wid ...

although they were in production later. The elegant lithics from Sankarjang resemble elaborate ones from eastern Asia and the South Seas. Such lithics played a key role in the definition of R. von Heine-Geldern's

Austronesian Austronesian may refer to: *The Austronesian languages *The historical Austronesian peoples The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Sout ...

culture. The incisor teeth of nine bodies interred in the graves had a "shovel" form which suggests Mongolian affinities. The absolute chronology rests on few 14C dates. Many of the stones give a resonance when struck and judging from the use-wear traces and shape, the stone bars appear to have belonged to finished and unfinished

lithophone A lithophone is a musical instrument consisting of a rock or pieces of rock which are struck to produce musical notes. Notes may be sounded in combination (producing harmony) or in succession (melody). It is an idiophone comparable to instrume ...

s. Yule and Bemmann thus tentatively identified the stone bars as being part of South Asia's earliest known musical instrument.

References

*P. Yule/B.K. Rath/K. Højgaard, Sankarjang ein metallzeitlicher Bestattungsplatz im Dhenkanal Vorgebirge des östlichen Indiens, ''Anthropos'' 84, 1989, 107–132, ISSN 0003-5572. *P. Yule/M. Bemmann, Klangsteine aus Orissa-Die frühesten Musikinstrumente Indiens?, ''Archaeologia Musicalis'' 2.1, 1988, 41–50 (also in English und French). http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/savifadok/volltexte/2008/177/ *P. Yule/A. Hauptmann/M. Hughes, The Copper Hoards of the Indian Subcontinent: Preliminaries for an Interpretation, ''Jahrbuch des Römisch Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz'' 36, 1989

992 Year 992 ( CMXCII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar. Events By place Worldwide * Winter – A superflare from the sun causes an Aurora Borealis, with visibility as far south as Germany and Korea. Euro ...

193–275, ISSN 0076-2741. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/savifadok/volltexte/2009/509/ * Paul Yule, ''Early Historic Sites in Orissa'' (Delhi 2006), . http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/savifadok/volltexte/2008/147/ http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/savifadok/frontdoor.php?source_opus=147&la=de {{Lithophones Lithophones Archaeological sites in Odisha

References

See also