When his yard at Thevarkadu, near Varapuzha, was being dug up to lay a water pipeline last month, little did Sijo A.A. know that he would stumble upon a ring well, a series of terracotta rings in the ground, used to store water.
“I had no idea how old it might be and have not studied history, but I was curious about it,” said the 33-year-old who approached several authorities, and then the PAMA Institute for the Advancement of Transdisciplinary Archaeological Sciences, a non-profit educational trust that carried out excavations at Pattanam and Mathilakam earlier this year.
An eight member team from PAMA unearthed the well, mostly in fragments, on Thursday, as part of a “rescue archaeology mission.”
Similar ring wells, some intact, were found at Pattanam and have been dated to the early historic period between 300 BCE and 500 CE, said P.J. Cherian, director, PAMA excavations at Pattanam and Mathilakam, 2020. “Our research question is, what might be the similarity of this well with the wells we found at Pattanam, some 15 km away. If it belongs to the same period, the settlement at Pattanam would be extended to a broader area. The burnt terracotta ring wells are a sign that we were advanced in terms of technology and organisation of life then,” he said.
“The well was present intact at the site, but we could only remove it in fragments. We began to see the rings from about 70 to 80 cm below the ground, up to around 200 cm. The deeper we went, more water came up to the surface, making it difficult to get to the rings,” said Rizvan P.S., who has a postgraduate degree in history and supervised the trench. “It could be difficult to give it a date using radio carbon dating considering the disturbances in the area. Stratigraphically, in the Periyar river belt, at 70 cm or deeper, the dates are usually in the early medieval period or early historic period,” said Rizvan who was also the trench supervisor for a few trenches at Mathilakam earlier this year.
A ring well had been uncovered near Mathilakam in January this year on private property, but the presence of water made it difficult to excavate the rings. Some of the ring wells found in Pattanam had only three or four rings, while the one at Varappuzha had about 13 rings.
“We do not have an informed chronology for these ring wells. They are found mostly in coastal, sandy regions. Carbon dating and the years of excavations at Pattanam point to the dates of the wells found there,” Mr. Cherian said.
Before he approached PAMA, Sijo was advised by people in the area to not report the presence of the well. “There is a kind of fear when people come across archaeological objects and they do not know what to do,” Mr. Cherian said. “After the studies, Sijo can claim the fragments. It should not be taken away from that panchayat or municipality area,” he added.