H. D. Sankalia was born on 10th December 1908. His parents were upper
middle-class Gujarati and his father was a solicitor. He was of a very delicate
physique and many thoughts that he would be unsuited to a career in
archaeology. He was well read in Indian history and traditions but a reading of
Lokmanya Tilak’s The Arctic Home in the Vedas at about sixteen years of age
inspired him to read Sanskrit and History in order to discover the antiquity and
original home of the Aryans.
He learnt archaeology by going for excavations at Maiden Castle, a Roman
castle being excavated by Mortimer Wheeler. He also learnt much from F. J.
Richards, an I.C.S. officer. In 1935-36 he went to Sind to see the excavation of
the Harappan site Chanhudaro conducted by Ernest Mackay. However, his
greatest teachers were the two volumes on the prehistoric antiquities in India by
Robert Bruce Foote, the father of Indian prehistory. He completed his Ph.D.
under the supervision of Professor K. de B. Codrington on a general survey of
archaeological remains of Gujarat, obtained his degree in 1936 and then returned
in India in
January 1937 to do research in the Prince of Wales Museum and the Asiatic
Society in Bombay. He was also teaching at the Heras Institute of Indian History
and Culture. He became a Professor of Proto-Indian and Indian History at
Deccan College in 1939 at a salary of 150 Rupees.
He found a reference in the District Gazetteer of a suburb of Poona having
some megalithic structures at Bhosari and investigated them.
He explored Gujarat in 1940, taking clues from Bruce Foote and located
new Palaeolithic and Mesolithic sites in the Sabarmati valley of Mehsana
district. He also jointly excavated Langhnaj, the famous Mesolithic site
with Iravati Karve, finding microlithic and other tools as well as faunal
remains and human burials.
In 1943-44 he investigated the Godavari Valley and its tributaries in the
Nasik district of Maharashtra and found a flake tool industry made of
chert and jasper. This became part of the Middle Palaeolithic in India.
In 1950-51, he excavated Jorwe on the Pravara river, Ahmednagar
district, Maharashtra.
In 1952 he found a basalt industry in Gangapur near Nasik in the
Godavari sediments exposed while constructing a dam.
In 1953-54 he excavated Maheshwar and Navdatoli on the northern and
southern banks of the Narmada in Nimad district, Madhya Pradesh
Navdatoli is likely to be drowned by the rising height of the water caused
by the Narmada dam by now.
In 1954-55, at Nevasa in Ahmednagar district he dug a Chalcolithic
mound and found a three-tier chronology in successive gravel deposits of
the Pravara river (a tributary of the Godavari). He called them Series I
(consisting of typical Acheulian industry of hand axes and cleavers made
on basalt and associated with mammalian fossils), Series II (sandy-pebbly
zone with small flake tools of chert and jasper associated with mammalian
fossils which formed the Middle Palaeolithic assemblage) and Series III
(blade tools made on chalcedony and being a part of the microlithic
phase). This disproved the Bruce Foote idea that the basalt area did not
have human habitations. This distinct Middle Palaeolithic phase was
reported by him in the famous journal Science in 1964.
In 1957-58 and 1958-59 he excavated Navdatoli. They found through this
largest of all, excavations at that time a Chalcolithic village of second
millennium BC. Links were found to Iran and he thought that it must have
contained an Indo-Aryan speaking people.
In 1954-56 and 1959-61 he excavated Nevasa in Ahmednagar district,
Maharashtra. He found remains of a Chalcolithic site here and after a gap
the later historical periods. This region, then, as a whole, had sites from
the Lower Palaeolithic to the present.
In the 1960s he explored Saurashtra and found more sites. He excavated
Sangankallu, a Mesolithic and pre-Mesolithic site in Bellary district,
Karnataka.
In 1961-62 he excavated the Chalcolithic site of Ahar near Udaipur in
Rajasthan. It was a large settlement from the late third millennium BC to
the mid-second millennium BC.
In 1969 -70 he explored the Liddar River at Pahalgam in Kashmir and
found a few early Palaeolithic tools there. He also excavated Inamgaon, in
Pune district, Maharashtra, later carried out by his students, for twelve
years in an elaborate manner. It was dated from 1600 BC to 700 BC and
contained over two hundred human skeletons.
He had also excavated Tripuri near Jabalpur in 1966 (Chalcolithic
habitation) and Tekkalakota (Bellary district, Karnataka).
He also excavated Dwarka in Gujarat but was unable to find anything
beyond the Christian era.
It is his impress upon archaeology, prehistory, protohistory and inscriptional
ethnography that has enabled Indian archaeology to rise to its present status in
the world. He developed from scratch Archaeology at Deccan College, turning it
into an area of excellence with a number of multi-disciplinary laboratories and
trained personnel. It is the only such University Department in India even today.
Unlike others, he was devoted not only to teaching and research but was also
involved in putting archaeology across to the people at large, writing popular
articles in English, Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi. In 1963 he wrote a monumental
Prehistory and Protohistory in India and Pakistan. The second edition came out
in 1974.
He used all kinds of data to construct a timeline for the region which was fairly
successful and which he had learnt from his teacher F.J. Richards. He supervised
about 47 Ph.D. s in his lifetime, and their names are like a roll call of
contemporary issues and names in Indian Archaeology.
He retired from Deccan College in 1973. However, he continued to find sites in
and around Pune, and many articles written by him attest to this. His house was
on an earlier bed of the Mula-Mutha river and was called Sat-Chit-Anand. He
excavated the land on which his house was built and found more tools. He then
invited the Prime Minister of India in 1987 to see the site and the finds. A rare
archaeologist, he published a stream of detailed reports on all that he excavated
and also summarized the findings, creating texts for students as a remarkable
synthesis of all the data available.
He died on 28th January 1989 in Pune.