Holistic Understanding of Ethnographic Data of the Region

This book, with about 250 pages and multiple useful illustrations, is a much-needed comprehensive work that fills the existing gap in both academic and non-academic understanding of early historic Gujarat. Apart from the Foreword and Introduction, the Appendix which follows the Conclusion is extremely useful as it introduces the different types of pottery of Gujarat. There is also a 69-page catalogue of pottery finds, artefacts, and inscriptions from different sites, a Bibliography and an Index.

The much-complicated primary and secondary histories of the region are carefully analysed in the four chapters of the book. The first, ‘History of the Western Kshatrapas of Gujarat’, gives a political and historical background of the region. This is followed by ‘The Material Culture and Settlement Patterns of Kachchh during the Kshatrapa Period’, which discusses the important sites in the region with a special emphasis on the pottery culture(s) of the region.