410 
J. HORN ELL ON 
children under two years old are often given roughly-made chank bracelets to wear 
in the belief that such will protect them against the baneful influence of the evil eye, 
from vomiting and from a wasting disease called chedi which appears to be rickets. 
The disease is reputed to be caused by the child being touched or approached by a 
woman during her menses ! This custom has now been abandoned or is perfunctorily 
performed by some of the better class Parawas, but the great majority, including 
naturally the whole of the poorer and the more ignorant sections of the community, 
continue to adhere strongly to the custom. These bangles are roughly finished and 
with the crudest of ornamentation ; they are made by Muhammadans at Kilakarai, 
their chief settlement on the coast of the Gulf of Mannar. 
The evidence furnished by the Tamil classics of the existence of an extensive 
chank bangle industry in the extreme south of India during the height of ancient 
Tamil civilization, 1200 to 2000 years ago, has received unexpectedly conclusive 
corroboration within the present year (1912) through discoveries which I have made 
on the sites of the once-famous Tamil cities of Korkai and Kayal (now Palayakayal). 
These cities are now represented by mounds of rubbish adjacent to villages still 
bearing the appellations of their celebrated predecessors. At Korkai which, as 
already noted, flourished from a date well antecedent to the Christian era down to 
some indeterminate time prior to 1000 a . d . when the accretion of silt at the mouth 
of the Tambraparni drove the inhabitants to build another city (Kayal) at the new 
mouth of the river, I made the greatest find. There, on the landward outskirts of 
the village, I unearthed a fine series of chank workshop waste— 17 fragments in all. 
The whole number were found lying on the surface of the ground in a place where 
old Pandyan coins have from time to time been discovered according to information 
gathered in the village. The fragments unearthed all bear distinct evidence of having 
been sawn by the same form of instrument, a thin-bladed iron saw, and in the same 
manner as that employed in Bengal at the present day. Eight fragments represent 
the obliquely cut “ shoulder-piece,” six consist of the columella and part of the oral 
extremity of the shell, and the remaining three are fragments of the lip — all show a 
sawn surface, the positive sign of treatment by skilled artisans. 
At Kayal or Palayakayal (■ i.e . Old Kayal) as it is now termed, the daughter city 
of Korkai, which flourished in the days of Marco Polo and which appears to have 
grown rich as Korkai gradually passed away as a seaport owing to physical changes 
in the delta of the Tambraparni, I found an excellently preserved sawn shoulder- 
piece, with marks of the apex having been hammered in after the present-day habit 
in Dacca workshops. This was found on the surface in an open space within the 
present village. Time did not allow me to prosecute a detailed search, but in my 
own mind the single fragment found is conclusive evidence of the industry having 
once been located here. No shell- cutting of any description is now carried on any- 
where in this neighbourhood. 
Again, at Tuticorin, I have found a sawn and hammered shoulder-piece of typical 
form, hence as the three discoveries were all made at places which in turn have been 
the head-quarters of the chank- fishery, I am fully convinced that at all three, chank- 
