1887.] PalcBoUthic Finds in South India. 269 



troughs were not deep enough to hold any quantity of water, but may 

 very likely have been used for mixing some kind of dough, for which 

 they were very well adapted. A few blocks showed very shallow hol- 

 lows, and such hollows are very common on rock surfaces, both in the 

 open and under rock-shelters. Some of these I believe to have been 

 mealing-troughs in which the grain the people used was finely mealed 

 with mealing-stones after having been roughly bruised with smaller and 

 lighter corn-crushers. Both of these kinds of implements are met with in 

 great numbers here and in almost every one of the many settlements of 

 the folk that I examined in the Bellary-Anantapur country, and are 

 especially numerous where great accumulations of ashes and other 

 kitchen stuff are met with. 



The signs of manufacture of implements I found on Kapgal con- 

 sisted of large numbers of unfinished celts in all possible states of com- 

 pletion and great quantities of flakes struck off from the selected frag- 

 ments of rock in the process of fabrication. In the case of Kapgal 

 settlement, the stone to be worked was procurable on the hill. It is a 

 fine grained pale greenstone (diorite ?), which occurs here and there in 

 irregular bands of some thickness within the mass of a huge dyke of 

 coarse black diorite that runs along the northern slope of the hill 

 parallel with its axis. In other settlements, the celts were found to be 

 made from pieces of greenstone of convenient shape collected from dykes 

 which in many cases occurred only at considerable distances ; and, in 

 these cases, the makers often worked up pieces whose exterior was 

 greatly pitted by weather action and did not take the trouble to remove 

 the weathered part except where the cutting edge was made. In some 

 few instances, pebbles were selected and so chipped as to utilize one or 

 other of them naturally. At Kapgal, this was not the case, and conse- 

 quently the celts there found have a much more recent look than those 

 from many of the other settlements. 



There is a great variety also in size and shape among the celts and 

 chisels, especially the former. This was doubtless intentional to suit 

 special purposes, but to some extent the makers evidently accommodated 

 themselves to the shape of the rough stone selected for treatment. This 

 cannot fail to strike the eye when a large series of the implements is 

 examined. Great differences in skill, in taste, and in patience must 

 have existed among the workers ; the beauty of shape and finish of the 

 implements varying so very greatly. Some are really elegant in shape 

 and others downright clumsy. The stages of manufacture through 

 which the more or less carefully chosen rough stones passed were cer- 

 tainly four in number, — chipping and picking, grinding and polishing. 

 The first stage, the chipping, was in all probability done by means of 



