Book excerpt: This volume highlights the extraordinary richness, diversity, and extensive distribution of iron ores in India, along with the equally rich, diverse, and widely scattered preindustrial tradition of iron and steel manufacture. Archaeologically, Chakrabarti demonstrates how by c. 1000 B.C. the major areas of the subcontinent passed into a full-fledged Iron Age, and how the process must be considered to have begun around the middle of the second millenium B.C. This book shows how the antiquity of Indian steel-making and examines literary sources which throw light on the use of iron in Indian agriculture.