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Assam funerary jars

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An interesting development in Indian archaeology has been the revisiting of the funerary stone jars from Assam. They were 1st noticed & classified by English archaeologists over 90 years ago. Subsequently, another English worker Bower recorded the Nagas raiding them for beads. In the past decade, they were reinvestigated by Thakuria who has given a detailed account of them & found them to be comparable to large stone jars from Laos.

What links Laos & Assam are the Southwestern Tai languages, a branch of the Tai-Kadai family. Another language family shared by NE India & Laos is Austroasiatic but we suspect these stone jars are more likely associated with the Tai expansion than the Austroasiatic expansion.

Many of these jars are made from hard stone that needed a hard metal chisel for working them. Thakuria found chisel marks both in the interior & exterior of some of them. They commonly are made of stones like sandstone & granite suggesting that the chisels were of iron. Thus, these must be dated to the post-iron age period, less consistent with the shared Austroasiatic languages. However, the Tai languages have at least two distinct ancestral words of Fe, *hlek & *mwa suggesting that their expansion was a post Fe-age phenomenon.+++(5)+++

Moreover, the word for chisel *siew is also reconstructible for the ancestor of these Tai languages. The word for Fe in Austroasiatic in SE Asia is a loan from Tai. Thus, we may say these jars possible serve as a marker for the spread of Tai speakers probably from a center near the Laos-Thailand-Burma border both to northwest & South. Some jars have decorations on them but AFAIK no script has been found on or near them. However, Thakuria has found them to be interspersed with stone discs that often have some interesting symbols on them with a clear sense of geometry. They also found stelae with anthropomorphic images on them - A stone with an anthropomorphic armed figure with a shikhA-like hair style and shield with a spear beside it.

These people could potentially represent predecessors of the speaker of Ahom & perhaps the Chutiya & Tai Phake languages.