Report: Peering into the Prehistoric Past of Bandhavgarh National Park, central India

This paper reports on recent discoveries of prehistoric findspots inside and around the Bandhavgarh National Park and Tiger Reserve (Madhya Pradesh, central India). These discoveries dramatically push the antiquity of a human presence in this region back from their known existence during the historic period into the prehistoric epoch. This also means that it was prehistoric people who were the first forest dwellers of the national park. The lithic scatters are marked by a variety of microlithic forms, with a strong possibility of an older, Upper Palaeolithic presence. The localities are several and are spread over about sixty square kilometres, within the core and buffer zones of the national park, some of them being close to different stretches of the Charanganga river. They suggest a prolonged hominin presence here, in time and space. One of these areas in particular, the Jwalamukhi Ashram site-complex (JMP) with multiple localities that have yielded early remains, holds immense potential for understanding the nature of prehistoric occupation in this region, their possible dates and their palaeoenvironmental contexts. Further, discoveries within the core region of the national park point to a deeper, and possibly different, relationship between prehistoric human populations in the forest, in relation to the known historical archaeological record in this region. Future work at the region will delve into characterising the nature of prehistoric occupation in the region through a study of the lithic assemblages noted and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction on the basis of the study of various environmental proxies.