65 



who found in the quartzite and trap rocks of the district 

 more suitable material for their weapons and tools than 

 the men to the southward where intractable gneiss 

 constitutes all the rocky outcrops. Certainly in prehis- 

 toric times, Bellary, Kurnul and Cuddapah were more 

 thickly populated than the country to the south if we may 

 judge from the evidence of the number of stone imple- 

 ments found respectively in these two sections of India, 

 The neolithic remains of these Deccan craftsmen show 

 their makers to have been comparatively highly-skilled 

 workers and with the discovery of the use of iron, hae- 

 matite ore being abundant in Bellary, the men of this 

 district may reasonably be supposed to have developed 

 special skill in the working of the new^ material into tools 

 and in the manufacture of manv articles, ornamental as 

 well as useful, with the aid of these improved tools. Add 

 to this the natural conservatism of tribes isolated from 

 the coast by hill ranges — the customs and manners of 

 the Deccan tribes have been less changed by contact 

 and intermixture with surrounding races than the majo- 

 rity of the tribes or races living in the coastal plains. 

 To these inland people the w^onder of the great shell 

 honoured by then- gods would appeal vividly ; the 

 mystery to them of its origin would confer added import- 

 ance and, as we find the wild hill tribes of Thibet, Assam 

 and Bhutan do at the present day, they would end by 

 endowing ornaments made from it with mysterious powers 

 of ensuring well-being and good luck, even as the 

 Buddhist cartmen of Ceylon and their, Hindu brethren 

 throughout the Southern Carnatic adorn their bulls with 

 a chank shell as an amulet against the evil eye. 



Chank shells for the Deccan bangle workshops may 

 probably have come from the Tanjore coast, this beino- 

 the nearest source of supply. The Tanjore fishery 

 appears to have been fairly lucrative down to 1826 when 

 economic changes caused a collapse of the industry. 

 Tirumalavasal at the mouth of one of the northern bran- 

 ches of the Kaveri is the centre of the chank fishery on 

 this part of the coast and is not far from Kaveri-pattanam, 

 once the chief port of the Chola kingdom and in the 

 height of its prosperity in the early centuries of the 

 Christian era. From Kaveri-pattanam to the inland 

 districts of Kurnul and Bellary the transit of goods would 



