1887.] PalaoUtMc Finds m South India, 267 



of tliem really elegant. They are of the typical glazed red and black 

 earthen-ware so characteristic of the prehistoric graves of Coimbatoor 

 and the Nilgiris. Two forms are, so far as I know, peculiar to that find, 

 the one is like a flower-pot with an extremely small base, the other is coni- 

 cal with slightly excavated sides and no base, so that it must have been 

 perched on a ring-stand when in use, and not held in the hand. Several 

 such rings fitted for larger vessels were found there. In the soil which had 

 filled some of the vessels, I found several good agate and chert cores, 

 and a few iron implements of (with one exception) small size ; long 

 arrow-heads with strong barbs, one of which is now in the Indian 

 Museum collection, and other forms. With these were several green- 

 stone corn-crushers, a large stone pestle with polished sides, and a highly 

 polished slyking- stone, or slickstone, made of a hornblendic rock. There 

 were also a small number of point bones too much broken to identify. 

 In addition, I found a small white bead made out of some shell, a human 

 premolar, a shell-scraper made by grinding away the lower half of 

 t)ne valve of a unio shell, and, lastly, a pottery spindle- whorl. The sur- 

 face of the ground a few yards to the east, which was freely scattered 

 over with broken antique pottery, yielded a good number of agate and 

 chert cores and flakes, all of the Jabalpur type, also a variety of larger 

 flakes, and several small but well worked scrapers. One of these latter 

 is an exact match to an old flint scraper from Yorkshire which I 

 have in my collection. A large quantity of mostly bright-coloured 

 pieces of chert, agate, jasper, quartzite, and lydian stone was also collected 

 on the same bit of ground ; having doubtless been brought there to be 

 used in making flakes ; all these stones are foreign to that immediate 

 neighbourhood, and the agates and lydian stones must have come from a 

 distance of 40 miles at the very least. Some of the pottery found in the 

 Yerizari-gabbi (cave) is ornamented in precisely the same way as the 

 large fragment of a pot (found lately at Quetta together with a very fine 

 ringstone and a jasper corn-crusher) which Mr. Wood-Mason is exhibit- 

 ing to-night.* No celts were found at Patpad, but I got a broken cylin- 

 drical hammer on the path leading to the Yerrazari-gabbi, and, as I 

 shall show presently, cores and flakes and the prehistoric red and black 

 glazed pottery occur largely, together with celts and a variety of other 

 typical Neolithic implements, in various places to the west of Patpad ; 

 such being the case, I do not hesitate in regarding the Patpad find as 

 late Neolithic overlapping into the Iron Age. The whole find was pre- 



* Pottery with the same peculiar ornament has also been found on the North 

 Hill Bellary and at Palavaram close to Madras. — Identically the same ornament 

 appears also on pottery figured by Sir William Dawson from the old Red Indian 

 city of Hochelagas in Canada. 



