23 India and Sri Lanka Dan Hicks, Michael D. Petraglia and Nicole Boivin 23.1 Introduction The reporting by John Evans in London of the discovery by Boucher de Perthes of Palaeolithic lint tools in the gravels at St Acheul in June 1859, just a few months before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, is often put forward as a formative moment for modern anthropology and archaeology (e.g. Evans 2009: 458; see Chapter 10), and especially for those parts of these disciplines that were most inluenced by the approaches with the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) (e.g. Trautmann 1992: 379). However, in considering the Asian archaeological collections of the PRM, a more signiicant mid 19th-century milestone was perhaps the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the subsequent formation of the British Raj in 1858. The archaeological collections from India and Sri Lanka held by the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) are intimately bound up with the history of the Raj (1858–1947): virtually all of the artefacts from these countries were obtained through British colonial institutions or from administrators, military personnel, missionaries, plantation authorities, and professional archaeologists and anthropologists. As this chapter will show, behind these ieldworkers stood collectors, whose interests in stone tools were global, such as John Evans, John Wickham Flower, A.M. Bell, and Pitt-Rivers himself. But while the focus of the collecting activities represented in the PRM collections was largely on Palaeolithic and Neolithic stone tools, a range of other Holocene archaeological material culture is also present. This chapter presents an overview of the collections from India (23.2) and Sri Lanka (23.3), and relects on their signiicance in a concluding section (23.4). The PRM holds c. 7,029 ‘archaeological’ objects from India and Sri Lanka (Figure 23.1): c. 5,449 from India, and c. 1,580 from Sri Lanka. A few collecting activities undertaken before 1857 are represented by these collections but, while there were transfers, exchanges and purchases between museums, virtually no collecting was carried out after the Second World War and Independence from Britain. Almost all are prehistoric stone tools, although a range of other material is also present. These collections are virtually unstudied, although many were published around the time of their discovery or donation, 1 and are often unquantiied, but they include some unique assemblages for the history of archaeology in the region. 1 Some partial notes on the Indian stone tool collections were assembled by Sarah Milliken (Milliken 2004). Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks, Michael Petraglia and Nicole Boivin 2013. India and Sri Lanka. In Dan Hicks and Alice Stevenson (eds) World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: a characterization. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 482-503. For further details on the book, and to order a copy, see http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/world.html Copyright © Pitt Rivers Museum, Archaeopress, editors and individual authors 2013. The Pitt Rivers Museum’s database can be accessed through the museum’s website at http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk. Research enquiries about the collections should be addressed to: Head of Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Email: objects.colls@prm.ox.ac.uk