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Archaeology deals with the story of man's past using mainly his material remains; and South India is rich in archaeological material. There are many specialities in the field of archaeology which deal with the different geographical regions of the world and with different periods. For instance there are scholars who specialize on Egypt and some on Assyria and they are called Egyptologists and Assyriologists. In Indian archaeology there are some scholars who specialize on the stone-age period, some on the bronze-age Harappan period, some on the iron-age period, some on sculpture, some on architecture and some on inscriptions. Archaeologists have developed their own rigorous methods in many branches of study such as, for instance, excavations.

After World War II many branches of modern science have contributed to the growth and development of modern archaeology. From the world of physics new instruments have been designed to aid the excavator to find out whether there is hidden material under the soil. Metal detectors are found useful for locating metal objects even under the surface. Atomic physics has given methods of dating excavated material. Among these methods Carbon-14 is the most widely known method, for dating objects such as wood, shell or bone. Archaeological chemists play an important role in the restoration and preservation of old paintings and bronze sculptures. From botany we have dendrochronology which is a well-known method of dating objects based on growth rings in trees.

In recent years computers have been used in the area of archaeology, and statistical methods form the basis for many of the computer applications in archaeology.

I am not an archaeologist by training, but my colleagues and I in the Statistics Department of the College have made some contributions to the field of Indian archaeology by developing and using computer methods. Before telling you all about our computer applications to archaeology let me try to recollect how I got introduced to this fascinating subject of archaeology.

More than twenty-five years ago I was travelling by road to Chingleput with Professor W. F. Kibble who was then the Head of the Mathematics Department in our College. I spotted from the car a blue board on a hill on the outskirts of Chingleput. Dr. Kibble stopped the car and we all went up the hill to examine the board. It was a board erected by the Archaeological Survey of India declaring it a protected area stating that it contained 'Megalithic Monuments'. Dr. Kibble explained the term megalithic as a term made of two words, mega large and lithic stone. We looked around and found stone circles and dolmens of the iron-age period. This led me to learn more about these iron-age monuments and  the special black and red pottery which is associated with them. Each pot is black inside and red outside.

I found that Chingleput district has a large number of iron-age monuments with vertical stones topped by a cap stone. A fine specimen can be seen from the Southern Trunk Road near Guduvancheri, others can be seen in the Vandalur zoo, on the top of a hill at Melkottaiyur on the Vandalur-Tirupporur road and at Tirupporur itself. Large stones about one metre in diameter form large circles of two to four metres radius. The monuments are burial sites which contain the bones of chieftains and warriors whose iron weapons are buried along with them. Not knowing the sepulchral function of these monuments, local people have placed stone images in them and converted them into little temples. These monuments are approximately over two thousand years old and that is about the period of early writing in Tamil Nadu. To find accurately the date of each monument, the bones have to be sent to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, for radio carbon dating. 

Apart from the iron-age sites, early stone-age implements have been found from many lake-beds in Chingleput district, and the earliest known stone implement was found in Pallavaram more than a hundred years ago.

In the late 1950s I went to the United States as a student and visited Britain on the way. I got the impression that people in Britain know quite a lot about their ancient and medieval monuments and I hadn' t even visited Mahabalipuram. On my return to the College I started visiting Mahabalipuram and learning about the art and architecture of the Pallavas.

Later on, Dr. Michael Lockwood joined our Philosophy Department and he was fascinated by the Chola bronzes and the Mahabalipuram monuments. That was the time when there was a lively controversy going on about the authorship of Mahabalipuram monuments. I was fascinated by the costumes and jewellery depicted on the Pallava monuments and started making a close study of them. Visiting an old monument with Dr. P. Dayanandan of the Botany Department and Dr. Lockwood, we were puzzled by the depiction of 'horns' on one of the gate-keepers, I mean the dvarapalakas. Till then it was a puzzle in art history as to what the so-called horns were. We finally established that these horns were no buffalo horns of a primitive dancer but the prongs of a trident. The other gate-keeper had an axe on his headgear. In some other monuments we found the discus on one gate-keeper and a shell on the other. With the weapons on the gate-keepers it was possible to establish the identity of the monuments which were empty otherwise.

The study of costumes also yielded many interesting facts. We found that at the end of the seventh century the style of costumes changed. In the early period, large circular ear-ornaments, the patra kundalas were worn asymmetrically on one side with the makara kundala on the other side. In the later period known as the Rajasimha period, the kundalas became smaller and due to change of fashion the same circular patra kundalas were worn symmetrically on both the sides. In the earlier period called the Mahendra period, men generally did not wear anklets but in the later period men were found with anklets. In the earlier period the breast-band worn by women was only a single piece tied across the breasts. In the later period, i.e. at the end of the seventh century two vertical straps were invented for the breast-band. Queens of the Pallava kings, however, are depicted in Mahabalipuram. without breast-bands but only warrior women and women gate-keepers are shown with breast-bands. We incorporated many of our findings in the form of a book.

Mahabalipuram monuments have many Sanskrit inscriptions in the Pallava Grantha script and at first we did not know how to read them. In the meanwhile I had learnt to read the Tamil inscriptions. I made a brief visit to the United States in the 1970's to undertake research in computer science. I went with ink copies, i.e. estampages, of Pallava inscriptions. Using the computer methods available at the University of Maryland I worked on the estampages and found methods of using a computer to improve the letters. The techniques used are called image enhancement techniques. The letters which appeared blurred on estampage came out clear on a uniform background. I reported it in the Journal of the Epigraphical Society of India making my first contribution in the area of computer application to Indian archaeology.

The scientists at the University of Maryland had developed methods of studying handwriting using a computer and it enabled me to develop methods of dating Tamil inscriptions using mathematical and computer methods. My colleagues and I have succeeded in developing a method and we are now perfecting it so that we can demonstrate it in our own computer in our Department. Letters of a newly-found inscription have to be examined from the ink copy or a photograph and the peculiar characteristics of each letter must be fed into a computer. On the basis of well-dated inscriptions stored in the computer, the date of the newly found inscription will be given, correct to a few decades. We reported the general methods at the Madurai World Tamil Conference and also in a journal called  'Computers and the Humanities'. Now Suresh, an M.Sc. student is perfecting the method with Dr. R. Chandrasekaran and Dr. M. Chandrasekaran who have been working in the area for many years.

Working on these computer methods of dating Tamil inscriptions we found that the educated man in Tamil Nadu does not know how to read common Chola inscriptions. We therefore developed a method of teaching the common man how to read these Tamil inscriptions. We have published a book in which we have on one side verses of the Tirukkural written in the ancient and medieval styles of Tamil script, but giving in the adjoining page the correct reading in modern Tamil. By this method any interested person can teach himself the scripts of the different periods. My two colleagues Dr. M. Chandrasekaran and Dr. S. Govindaraju of our Statistics Department collaborated with me in writing the book. It was published with a grant from the Department of Science and Technology, who are interested in "the preservation of ancient monuments".

Dr. Govindaraju is an amateur artist and I wished to associate him with some project involving art and statistics. We put up a proposal to the Department of Science and Technology for analysing measurements of sculptures using computer methods. With their grant, Dr. Govindaraju and Dr. Bagavandas of our department were able to work on sculptural measurements, or iconometry. We took measurements of different parts of sculptures at Mahabalipuram for a computer analysis.

One of the questions we were interested in was whether the measurements found on the sculptures are in close conformity with the proportions prescribed in the literary texts. The texts, the Silpa Sastras, give measurements in the angula unit, but we measure in inches. In the Sastras all the faces, whether they are large or small, have the same length in angula measurement. We had to make allowance for that. If the face is twelve angulas long, the nose must be four angulas, that is for a pretty face. We found   that the nose length was a little longer on the sculptures on the Five Rathas and other cave temples. However on the Shore temple built by Rajasimha the nose is extraordinarily long. The monuments at Kanchipuram built by Rajasimha also exhibit the special feature of extraordinarily long noses and long and narrow eyes. We found first that the nose-length of the sculptures of the Rajasimha period is different from what is prescribed in the Silpa Sastras. The extraordinarily long nose is not found in the sculptures of the Arjuna's Penance, the Five Rathas and other cave temples. In addition to the evidence from costume history, we found clear evidence that Rajasimha could not have carved the Rathas and the cave temples. We had to use statistical and computer methods to settle that question in art history.

The average values of facial proportions of the Mahabalipuram sculptures are statistically different from  the average values of the proportions of Rajasimha sculptures. These average values also give us the kind of standard proportions that the sculptors had used. This is a kind of recovery of lost proportions.

The Sastras talk about ten sets of proportions. For instance the nine-face proportion or the nava tala proportion has the face-length as one ninth of the total height. The gods are made in the dasa tala or the ten-face proportion in which the total height is ten times the face length. Figures with proportionately small heads appear tall. This is the main principle used in the agamas to make a figure appear tall, i.e. make head small and the figure will appear tall. To make a figure appear relatively short the texts propose that the figures be made in the five-face proportion, i.e. the total height will be only five times the face length. If you make the head large then the figure will appear short. Our computer study showed that there are two entirely different systems of proportions which are intermingled in the texts and we were able to make out the difference between the two systems.

There is one more area in archaeology which is of great interest. It is the study of the Indus Valley civilization. The Indus writings have not been deciphered even though some people imagine they have done so. Scholars are waiting for the day when some bilingual inscription could be found. The ancient Egyptian writings called the hieroglyphics were deciphered on the basis of what is called the Rosetta stone. The stone has texts written in three different scripts. One is in the known Greek script and another in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Scholars are hoping that some day some material may turn up from some excavation with a text written in a known script and also in the undeciphered Indus script.

Mr. Iravatham Mahadevan has produced a beautiful concordance of the texts of the Indus civilization. To produce this concordance a computer was used in arranging the texts in an orderly fashion according to the context in which the different signs occur.

My colleague Mr. Abdul Huq and I are working on the Indus texts using computer methods. We have classified the signs into specific clusters or groups using a technique called numerical taxonomy. We have also tried with the help of a computer to find out whether there is strong affinity between pairs of signs which occur together. We test whether the occurrence of one sign followed by another specific sign is purely due to chance or due to some affinity between the signs. Using a method called dynamic programming we have tested whether long texts form one unit or more than one unit. Even though the script is still undeciphered we are searching for patterns in the text which will lead to a greater understanding of the problem of deciphering the Indus script.

This briefly is some of the interesting work that has been going on in the area of computer application to Indian archaeology in the Department of Statistics of the Madras Christian College.

Recently, after the completion of this paper, I went to see some monuments at Pattadkal near Badami. There is a famous temple called the Virupaksha built by a queen of the Chalukya King Vikramaditya I (733-746). I examined with interest a sculpture of a gatekeeper depicted with horns. On closer inspection I found a head projecting forward from the wall, and behind the head was the central prong of a trident establishing once and for all that the horns are certainly the two outer prongs of the trident which is a weapon associated with Siva.