A group of students of Calcutta University has unearthed evidences of a human settlement in coastal Bengal from the copper age, roughly between the second and first millennium BC.
The rare find - at Erenda in East Midnapore's Egra sub-division, 30km from the Bay of Bengal coast - junks notions that humans have been living in the coastal regions of Bengal only since the Mauryan (322-185 BC) and the Kushan (2nd-3rd century) periods.
Earlier, Chalcolithic sites - ones dating to the Copper age - were discovered upland, in Birbhum and Burdwan for example.
"The settlement in Erenda could be spread across a 100m-by-100m area, of which 30m by 35m remains. We did a trial dig across 36sq m and reached the sijua surface (yellow clay with calcium carbonate deposits 10,000 years old)," said Kaushik Gangopadhyay, a teacher in the archaeology department of Calcutta University.
Gangopadhyay, along with colleagues Rajat Sanyal and Bishnupriya Basak (departmental head), had discovered and explored the site in 2013.
This year, a group of 14 students from the department continued with the excavation at a mound called Basholir Mandir and discovered pottery shards (both black and red ware), pottery hand painted with geometric designs, bone tools shaped like harpoons and copper items. Also found were a small metal axe and a metal bangle.
The floor of a house or a courtyard has been found, as well as an oven, charred bones, mollusk shells and carbon samples.
The carbon samples may reveal more secrets about the ancient lifestyle.
Life in the coastal region must have been transitional because of cyclones and other storms but it must have been rich in food sources. The inhabitants must have been a hunting-farming community.
The floor is typical of chalcolithic habitation: clay rammed with pottery and calcium carbonate nodules, which made the surface hard and stable. The walls of such houses are typically made in the same technique and sometimes poles are used to hold thatched roofs. The area retains its rural characteristics, which have in a way preserved these early signs of human endeavour.
