A Preliminary Survey of the Iron Age Burials in Thiruvananthapuram District, Kerala with Special Reference to Nellanad Village Kumbodharan S., Rajesh S. V. and Abhayan G. S. Introduction The megalithic culture is the major field of research in Kerala and the Megalithic archaeology of the state is still in the beginning stage in spite of the number of works carried out in the state in 19 th and 20 th centuries. Scholars were mainly interested in certain aspects of the Megalithic archaeology of particular regions. As a result, majority of the places in Kerala haven’t received much attention. Thiruvananthapuram district is one such area where very less systematic researches were conducted till date. Various agencies like Archaeological survey of India, State Archaeology Department and various universities conducted sporadic explorations and excavations in different parts of Thiruvananthapuram. But a systematic exploration of Thiruvananthapuram is a very important task. Without extensive explorations and systematic study of the burials, a real account of the Megalithic culture of Thiruvananthapuram could not be developed. It was therefore a preliminary survey conducted in Nellanad village of Nedumagadu taluk to understand the present scenario of megalithic monuments in Thiruvananthapuram district and the explorations yielded 8 new megalithic sites. Previous Studies Studies on Kerala megaliths are theoretically not at par with other states in peninsular India. Thiruvananthapuram, the southern district of Kerala failed to draw the attention of archaeologists and pre-historians as it required for reasons hard to explain and this prompted the researcher to undertake the research question. A review of the published literature suggests that there are 30 megalithic sites in Thiruvananthapuram district. The sites reported in various journals, books and Indian Archaeology – A Review suffers from lot of limitations. In many cases, not only are the geo-coordinates not given, but even details such as distance and direction from the nearest village and name of the district are not provided. Megalithic archaeology of Thiruvananthapuram was linked by stray finds and most of the sites were discovered accidently. The typology and distribution of the megalithic monument in the study area are available from a few published works. As a result of the detailed survey of the published works on megaliths of Thiruvananthapuram, totally 30 reported sites were documented (Table 1). Among the documented sites, the major typology of the Burials from the district was Urns or Nannangadi. Totally 23 urn burials (Figure 1) were reported from 19 sites of the district; which 13