Animal Husbandry and Allied Technologies in Ancient India

Humans have always had an interesting relationship with animals which, over the past ten thousand years has shifted from predator-prey to a more balanced co-existence. Humans have adopted many methods of controlling animals in order to build up a secure resource base through animal husbandry followed by domestication. The history of this interaction has been retold here in a very lucid and simple manner for the benefit of general educated readers. It includes information that will help readers understand the changing relationship of humans and animals and the long-term and far-reaching consequences for human society that have resulted. The book is structured in such a way that each of the eight individual chapters are independent of each other but, collectively, these present the complete history of human-animal interactions in the Indian subcontinent. Thus, while each chapter is complete by itself, together they open up a vast spatiotemporal vista of the human-animal relationship. The first chapter introduces complex ways human interaction with the animals during the primitive past. The second chapter examines various dynamics of animal domestication. The third chapter deals with different processes of domestication of animals. The forth chapter is focussed on archeo-faunal data recovered from the palaeolithic and mesolithic sites in Indian subcontinent. The fifth chapter, divided into three sections, explores the early farming cultures of South Asia. The sixth chapter is devoted to the animals in the Indus Civilisation. The seventh chapter deals with the post-Indus cultures of South Asia, and the last chapter attempts to recapitulate the main issues taken up in the study and to visualise what the future holds for the human-animal relationships.