Every evening, after archaeologist Shanti Pappu and her colleagues head home for the night, two watchmen patrol the team’s excavation site—a plot of dry scrubland near Sendrayanpalayam village, about a two-hour-drive from Chennai in southern India. Without such vigilance, the site could easily be disturbed. To the left of the carefully dug trenches, for instance, lies a bulldozed pit, dredged to remove sand and gravel for a public works project before the researchers started their excavation in 2019, says Pappu, the founder of Sharma Center for Heritage Education in Chennai….
