National

Iron Age burial site in Tamil Nadu being razed

CHENNAI: An Iron Age burial site dotted with cairn circles, menheirs and cist-slabs, near Vellaripatti village near Madurai on the Madurai-Tiruchi highway, is being destroyed. Archaeologists date the megalithic site between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C.

Real estate developers have uprooted and swept up hundreds of cairn circles (big stones arranged in the form of circles), menheirs (tall granite slabs erected vertically) and cist-slabs (rectangular granite slabs laid on the ground), all of which mark burial spots. Bulldozers have swept clean a big area that had earlier been crowded with cairn circles, menheirs and cist-slabs. Border stones have been planted in the cleaned-up area to indicate house sites. A fencing post has been erected close to a beautifully laid cairn circle, and it is only a matter of time before this cairn circle disappears.

V. Vedachalam, retired Senior Epigraphist, Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department, called the site “a rare monument because it is difficult to get all three — cairn circles, menheirs and cist-slabs — in the same place near Madurai.”

That Vellaripatti had a flourishing merchants’ guild in the third century B.C., Dr. Vedachalam said, had been attested by Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions found at nearby Mankulam. “So Vellaripatti was an ancient settlement. This was the burial site of people who lived there,” he explained.

These inscriptions used the expression “Vellarai nigamam,” that is, it had a merchants’ guild. (While this burial site is situated on the foothills of the eastern side of Perumal Malai, Mankulam is situated on the western side. A cist-slab indicates a burial chamber below with two compartments, one to house the body and another to keep burial pots, paddy, weapons and the personal effects of the deceased).

While a number of cairn-circles, menheirs and cist-slabs remain among the thorny bushes, hundreds of others have been destroyed and plots parcelled out. Stones from cairn-circles are piled up. A road has been laid. A Ganesh temple has been erected. Industrial units have also come up several hundred metres away.

Dr. Rajan, Head of the Department of History, Pondicherry University, who has specialised in studying megalithic burials and monuments in Tamil Nadu, said this site would have probably existed from 1,000 B.C. and would have been transformed into an early historical site around the 5th or 4th century B.C. Two Mankulam inscriptions referred to Vellarai and mentioned a Pandya king called Nedunchezhiyan. The inscriptions referred to the existence of a trade centre at Vellarai, Dr. Rajan said. “This is a historical site with a landscape… If we excavate this site, we can reconstruct the economic, social and cultural life of the Tamils of the Sangam age.”

Dr. Vedachalam and Dr. Rajan wanted the burial site to be declared a protected site and be taken over by the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology or the Archaeological Survey of India.

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