By Ashish Arora on September 14, 2011
Sarnath soil-relation with Akatha
A team of students from Archaeology Department, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), is excavating in Akatha village, near Paharia, Varanasi to find out its probable connection with Sarnath. The archeology team has been excavating in this village for a few days now.
Though their research, they look to reveal the relation between the two places has been continuously on for a long time. BHU Prof Mridula Jaiswal, the team leader, shares about her logical intuition about this connection. “It is intuition but logical one, which makes you confident about the place you are excavating”, Prof Jaiswal, asserts.
A excavation to reveal connection
She shows two places in Akatha village, which she is excavating with her team of archaeology students. Having excavated for a plenty of metres, she got several evidences to prove her intuition a logical one.
Pottery of different periods, which is got from the burial, is something that is both a decorative and necessity of people. It is in red color but in various shapes. The archeology team have also recovered many coins of different designs from the soil. These coins tell the story of their periods themselves.
The layers on the walls of the excavated area are also a measure of chronology. Different layers mark out different periods of time. The red-colored bricks demonstrate a period of time rather different than black ones. That means, red-colored bricks were used in a period that differs from the period of black ones.
Sarnath’s soil-relation with Akatha
“The age of stones are determined by carbon-14”, Jaiswal adds. She is quite confident about the ‘soil-relation’ of Sarnath with Akatha village. If she becomes successful in searching the facts of Buddha period from the soil, she will like to go ahead with some more metres of excavation so that she can find out some more clues of past centuries sleeping in the historical soil.
