Social Formation and Urbanization in Iron Age-Early Historic Tamizhagam in South India

After Neolithic (fourth millennium BCE), southern India witnessed the beginning of the Iron Age in the second millennium BCE based on recent investigations. It was characterized by population diversity with communities living in varied ecological niches as hunter-gatherers, farmers, and pastoralists by early first millennium BCE. With settlements developed even during Neolithic times, incipient internal exchange networks became stronger during Iron Age and long-distance ones developed during late Iron Age. Political formation marked by bands of foragers, tribal formations, and supra-local natu-like territorial formations headed by kizhars and Velirs, can be characterized as chiefdoms or ranked societies in the Iron Age. In addition, the early historic period witnessed Vendar-level non-kinship-oriented federations. Local interactions and hierarchical formations of chiefs, village-headmen, merchants, and their kin constituted a high-ranking social group that controlled the production and redistribution. These internal forces of cultural change created the foundation for urbanization. Long-distance networks connected northern India and the Indian Ocean regions with ancient Tamizhagam from the first millennium BCE. Merchant networks and priestly classes brought material goods and Brahmanical, Jain, and Buddhist ideologies became contributory factors for urbanization. The paper seeks to elaborate on the social processes that enhanced urbanization from the Iron Age to the early historic period in Tamizhagam, namely, the contemporary states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala through a perusal of evidence such as monuments, material culture, visual narratives, symbolic representations, and texts.