Painted Grey Ware culture

[6] Characterized by a style of fine, grey pottery painted with geometric patterns in black,[7] the PGW culture is associated with village and town settlements, domesticated horses, ivory-working, and the advent of iron metallurgy.

[10] The PGW Culture probably corresponds to the middle and late Vedic period, i.e., the Kuru-Panchala kingdom, the first large state in the Indian subcontinent after the decline of the Indus Valley civilisation.

[1][2] Akinori Uesugi regards PGW as having three periods within North Indian Iron Age which are: When it makes its appearance in the Ghaggar valley and the upper Ganga region.

Some sites, including Jakhera in Uttar Pradesh, demonstrate a “fairly evolved, proto-urban or semi-urban stage” of this culture, with evidence of social organization and trade, including ornaments of gold, copper, ivory, and semi-precious stones, storage bins for surplus grain, stone weights, paved streets, water channels and embankments.

The range of decoration is limited - vertical, oblique or criss-cross lines, rows of dots, spiral chains and concentric circles being common.

[18] At Bhagwanpura in the Kurukshetra district of Haryana, excavations have revealed an overlap between the late Harappan and Painted Grey Ware cultures, large houses that may have been elite residences, and fired bricks that may have been used in Vedic altars.

[23] According to Chakrabarti (1968) and other scholars, the origins of the subsistence patterns (e.g. rice use) and most other characteristics of the Painted Grey Ware culture are in eastern India or even Southeast Asia.

[note 2] In 2013, the University of Cambridge and Banaras Hindu University excavated at Alamgirpur near Delhi, where they found a period overlap between the later part of the Harappan phase (with a "noticeable slow decline in quality") and the earliest PGW levels; Sample OxA-21882 showed a calibrated radiocarbon dating from 2136 BCE to 1948 BCE, but seven other samples from the overlap phase that were submitted for dating failed to give a result.

Cemetery H, Late Harappan, OCP, Copper Hoard and Painted Grey ware sites
Painted Grey Ware - Sonkh ( Uttar Pradesh ) - 1000-600 BCE. Government Museum, Mathura
Fragments of Painted Grey Ware, about 1000 BC, from Hastinapur and Radhakund , Uttar Pradesh , and Panipat and Tilpat , Haryana . British Museum .
Shards of Painted Grey Ware (right) and Harappan red pottery (left) from Rupnagar , Punjab .
Archaeological cultures associated with Indo-Iranian migrations (after EIEC ). The Andronovo , BMAC and Yaz cultures have often been associated with Indo-Iranian migrations. The GGC (Swat), Cemetery H , Copper Hoard and PGW cultures are candidates for cultures associated with Indo-Aryan migrations .