Keezhadi's Brick Walls, Ring Wells and 56 Tamil-Brahmi Inscribed Potsherds Come From a Vaigai Settlement That the Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department Dates to the 6th Century BCE

Keezhadi is a mound of more than 110 acres in Sivaganga district, 13 km east and south-east of Madurai, with the Vaigai river 2 km to the north. Excavation there has exposed brick walls, wells built of stacked terracotta rings, roof tiles and pots that their owners scratched with Tamil-Brahmi letters. The Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology, which has run the dig since its fourth season in 2017-18, dates the settlement’s deposit between the 6th century BCE and the 1st century CE.

The department set out its findings in a 2019 volume, Keeladi: An Urban Settlement of Sangam Age on the Banks of River Vaigai. The state’s own publications spell the name Keeladi; the village is also written Keezhadi, and both spellings turn up in the sources below. The Sangam poems that give the volume its title are covered in our piece on Sangam literature. This article stays with the ground: what was dug up, how it was dated, and where archaeologists read the dates differently.

Two excavating teams on one mound

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) dug the first three seasons, 2014-15 to 2016-17, through its Excavation Branch in Bengaluru. The state department took over for 2017-18 and 2018-19, according to its volume. The Union Culture Minister told the Lok Sabha in a written reply on 21 July 2025 that the state-run excavations have gone on since 2018, that the ASI does not fund them, and that the tenth phase began on 18 June 2024, as DT Next reported.

K. Amarnath Ramakrishna, the ASI archaeologist who led those phases, submitted a 982-page report on the first two of them in January 2023, The Wire reports. Its fate is the subject of the last two sections below.

Brick walls, ring wells and roof tiles

The fourth season alone recorded 5,820 antiquities, the state volume says, among them brick structures, terracotta ring wells and fallen roof tiles. One exposed wall is 13 m long and three courses of brick high. The bricks come in two sizes, 38 by 23 by 6 cm and 38 by 26 by 6 cm. Fine-clay floors sit beside the wall, and post-holes at regular intervals show where wooden poles once carried the roof. The excavators found iron nails that they read as fastenings for poles and rafters.

The roof tiles have finger-pressed grooves to carry rainwater and a pair of holes at the top for tying them to rafters. The volume notes that similar tiles were found at Arikamedu, the early port on the Coromandel coast.

The ring wells are stacks of fired-clay rings. One in the first trench described in the volume stood 2.02 m tall and 93 cm across, with its rings found intact; another, at the lowest level of ring wells found at the site, is 62 cm across and sits on river sand. The department also sent bricks, roof tiles, lime mortar and well-ring binder to the Vellore Institute of Technology. The bricks and tiles came out at more than 80 per cent silica mixed with about 7 per cent lime, and the lime plaster at 97 per cent lime. The volume credits the quality of the materials for how well the structures have lasted.

Pots, looms and board games

Two adjacent trench quadrants, below 4 m, held heaps of pottery in quantities the volume describes as many cartloads, and it suggests a pottery-making industry at the site. Seventeen pottery specimens went to the Earth Science Department at the University of Pisa, through the Vellore Institute of Technology. The results, as the volume reports them, show water pots and cooking vessels made from locally available raw material, with the same techniques and materials used from the 6th to the 2nd century BCE. A few 2nd-century BCE pieces contain earth like that of other regions, which the volume reads as evidence of goods moving between neighbouring areas. The black-and-red ware needed kiln temperatures of around 1,100 degrees Celsius, the volume says. It lists Muziri-pattanam on the Periyar among the ports through which pearls, gemstones, textiles, steel, pepper and perfumes left the Tamil country; our article on Muziris covers that port.

Ten spindle whorls and 20 bone points, with a copper needle and vessels for liquid, are read as signs of spinning and weaving. The ASI’s own excavation team reported evidence of a dyeing industry. The department lists seven gold ornaments, glass and stone beads, shell and ivory bangles, 600 hopscotch pieces and 80 gaming pieces. A faunal study by the Deccan College in Pune, on 70 bone fragments, found cattle the largest group at 25 per cent. The volume adds that no object meant for worship had been found so far.

Pots marked by their owners

The volume reports 1,001 graffiti sherds, pot fragments with marks scratched on them, and 56 Tamil-Brahmi inscribed sherds from the state department’s own excavation. Tamil-Brahmi is the early script of Tamil. The volume says the Keezhadi letters were cut after firing, which means the buyers of the pots, not the potters, engraved them. It reads that as a sign of high literacy among the pots’ users. One sherd carries six letters that the volume reads, with a conjectural last letter, as a personal name, Kuviran-tan.

The ASI’s earlier seasons produced their own count. Scroll reported on 28 July 2017 that the Culture Ministry told the Rajya Sabha of 72 potsherds with Tamil-Brahmi script, and that Ramakrishna listed names on them such as Iyanan, Uthiran, Vendhan, Santhanavathi and Saathan. The 72 and the 56 come from different digs, and this article does not add them.

The state volume draws two conclusions from the script finds. Tamil-Brahmi had been dated to about the 5th century BCE from radiometric dates at Kodumanal, Alagankulam and Porunthal, and the volume says Keezhadi pushes that back by a century. It also argues that the second wave of urbanisation, first seen in the Ganges plains in the 6th century BCE, happened in Tamil Nadu in the same century. The volume also recalls that Ashoka’s rock edicts 2 and 13 name the Chola and Pandya kingdoms; our article on Ashoka covers the emperor himself.

What the carbon samples say

Two sets of radiocarbon results exist. In 2017 the ASI sent two carbon samples, not artefacts, to Beta Analytic in Florida. the Minister of State for Culture told the Rajya Sabha they were 2,160 and 2,200 years old, in the New Indian Express’s account; Swarajya gave the figures as 2,160 and 2,200 years with a margin of 30 years each, while Scroll reported a range of 2,160 to 2,230 years. Scroll says the deposits were up to 4.5 m deep and the dated samples came from about 2 m down. Ramakrishna told The Hindu the samples were from the third century BCE, Scroll reported. A Madras High Court bench hearing a petition to preserve the site noted a radiocarbon range of about 200 BCE to 130 BCE, The Hindu reported.

In 2018 the state department sent six carbon samples from its fourth season to the same laboratory for accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating, a method that counts carbon-14 atoms directly. All six fall between the 6th and 3rd centuries BCE, the volume says. The sample from 353 cm down goes back to the end of the 6th century BCE, which The Federal gave as 580 BCE, and one from 200 cm down to the early 3rd century BCE. Because the deposit continues above and below the dated layers, the department says it can be dated between the 6th century BCE and the 1st century CE. T. Udayachandran, the state’s commissioner of archaeology, said the results move the origin of Tamil-Brahmi and of literacy in the region to the 6th century BCE, Archaeology magazine reported.

An annexure to the volume sorts the site into three periods: Period I from the 6th to the 3rd century BCE, Period II from the 3rd century BCE to the 4th or 5th century CE, and Period III from then to the 11th or 12th century CE.

Where archaeologists differ on what the dates cover

Bishnupriya Basak of the University of Calcutta told The Wire in October 2019 that the report does not make clear whether the Tamil-Brahmi sherds came from the same layers as the samples dated to the 6th century BCE. E. Harsha Vardhan of Dravidian University said the script cannot be placed in the 6th century BCE on the strength of a single report, and added that the excavation sheds light on how graffiti turned into early Tamil-Brahmi. Prabodh Shirvalkar of the Deccan College, whose colleagues were on the dig team, said the second urbanisation appears to have happened locally at Keeladi.

P. A. Krishnan, a former civil servant, argued in The Federal that a radiocarbon date shows when the organism died and cannot be carried over to the pots, and that the level at which the inscribed sherds were found is not recorded. He also noted the site had been disturbed.

The ASI’s own review is a separate matter. ThePrint reported on 29 June 2026 that Ramakrishna’s report puts the site in three periods, with the earliest running from the 8th to the 5th century BCE. In a written reply on 21 July 2025, the Culture Minister said expert comments called that bracket unjustified, held that the earliest period could at best be placed before 300 BCE, and asked for each scientific date to carry its layer number. They also listed missing items, among them a redrawn village map, plates, drawings, trench plans and contour maps. The minister said the report is under review and has not been rejected. Ramakrishna declined to revise it. According to The News Minute on 5 February 2026, a five-member ASI committee produced a 114-page assessment, and he called it formulaic and lacking in engagement with the material from the site. He proposes a span from the 8th century BCE to the 3rd century CE.

Two museums, and the review still to come

The Tamil Nadu government opened a Keeladi museum on 5 March 2023, a 31,000 sq ft building that cost an estimated Rs 18.43 crore, Outlook reported. An open-air museum on 4.5 acres, costing Rs 24.30 crore, was inaugurated by video link on 13 February 2026, and shows original brick walls, terracotta pipelines and ring wells, ThePrint reported.

On the report, ThePrint wrote on 29 June 2026 that the ASI’s director general had written on 24 June that an internal five-member committee would re-examine it on site. The report was unpublished at that date.