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Experts at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) unearthed a gold diadem from a huge burial urn while excavating the museum site at Adichanallur on Monday. This is the second gold ornament found at Adichanallur in the recent excavation phase.The officials said the precious metal was found inside a huge urn discovered in a pit with a diameter of 2.63 feet. The urn was interred into a rock of the same diameter. VP Yathees Kumar, who led the excavation, said the gold diadem was 3.5 cm long and found at the depth of 4.40 metres. “The diadem is yet to...

Previously, the Iron Age burial site of Adichanallur in southern Tamil Nadu had revealed an impressive collection of iron implements, currently housed in Chennai’s Egmore Museum, dated between 1000 BCE and 600 BCE.Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, while addressing the Tamil Nadu Assembly Monday, said: “It has been found that the date of the iron artefacts ranges from 2172 BCE to 1615 BCE. The results have reiterated the fact that the Iron Age of Tamil Nadu dates back 4,200 years, which is the oldest in India.”This finding has answered questions relating to the start of agricultural activity in Tamil Nadu, he...

The south east coast of Tamil Nadu was inhabited in pre-historic times mainly by Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids and Australoids rather than people similar to contemporary Tamils, a dental anthropological study has found. A team of anthropologists came to the finding after studying more than 1,000 teeth from Adichanallur's pre-historic harbour site on the south-east coast of Tamil Nadu that dates back to 2,500 BC... Optical microscope techniques were employed to study the teeth, which have shown the various growth stages, ageing and wearing processes, racial and ethnic and geographical affinities, dietary patterns, jaw mechanism, constitutional abnormalities of the jaws, pathological...