Beneath an apparently ordinary village on the Periyar delta in southwestern India lies an archaeological record linking the eastern and western Indian Ocean worlds — from the Atlantic shores of western Europe to the South China Sea opening to the Pacific.
That village is Pattanam, near North Paravur in Ernakulam district, Keralam.
Houses, shops, tarred roads, pathways, a government primary school, a couple of hospitals, coconut groves and waterbodies now occupy much of this coastal landscape. Beneath it, however, lies evidence that has changed our understanding of Keralam’s early history and the maritime world of the Indian Ocean and beyond.
The archaeological evidence broadly dates to between 300 BCE and 300 CE, with particularly substantial evidence from 100 BCE to 300 CE. Structures, pottery, beads, metals, coins, biological and geological remains, industrial and workshop contexts, and a harbour complex with a wooden canoe dated between 100 BCE and 100 CE have been scientifically documented.
Materials from South Asia, West Asia, the Red Sea, Africa and the Mediterranean have been found alongside evidence of the movement of people, goods, technologies and ideas across considerable distances.
The evidence suggests that Pattanam was part of the maritime world conventionally associated with Muziris, or Muciri Pattinam. Whether the entire ancient port can be identified with present-day Pattanam remains an open archaeological question.
This is one reason the excavation and scientific investigation of Pattanam must resume.
What did the research reveal?
Excavations and explorations beginning in 2006-07 gradually transformed what initially appeared to be an ordinary archaeological mound into an international multidisciplinary research laboratory.
Between 2006 and 2023, 67 trenches were excavated, yielding around 1.3 lakh registered artefacts and nearly 45 lakh pottery fragments. Yet less than 1% of the archaeological mound, which extends over more than 100 acres, has been excavated.
The discoveries were important not merely because of their quantity. Structures, urban features such as toilet facilities and water-drawing wells, industrial remains, artefacts and environmental evidence together point to a highly connected settlement.
Pattanam emerged not as an isolated site in Keralam, or simply as a centre of Keralam-Roman trade, but as a node in a much wider network spanning the ancient world.
The Periyar and the river systems between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea were central to this story. Recent studies have identified nearly 51,800 rainforest islands, together with the human geographical landscapes represented by the Kurinji, Mullai, Marutham, Paalai and Neithal thinai traditions.
Pattanam occupied an ancient river-mouth landscape connected to the Western Ghats, their forests and resources. Through the Periyar, the Palakkad Gap and the Vaigai basin, the western coast was linked to the eastern seaboard and, beyond it, to the Bay of Bengal, the Andaman Sea and the South China Sea.
Archaeological parallels link Pattanam with sites extending from Corbridge in England in the west to Hepu in southern China in the east, and from Tissamaharama in Sri Lanka in the south to Kopia, near the India-Nepal border, in the north, close to the Lumbini-Kapilavastu region.
The first decade of research brought together an extraordinary range of institutions and specialists. Universities and research institutions including Oxford, Georgia, Rome, Durham, UCL, the Palace Museum in Beijing and the British Museum in London, together with several others in Europe, North America, Asia and India, participated in different aspects of the work.
Researchers, scientists, students and the local community worked together with specialists in archaeology, art, architecture, history, anthropology, geology, genetics, physics, petrography, environmental science, linguistics, epigraphy, literature, conservation, museum studies, photography and other fields. Pattanam thus became a place where scholars from different parts of the world could come together to investigate a shared human past.
International research scholarships were conceived. An interdisciplinary residential Diploma programme was launched at Pattanam in 2015. Plans were developed for multipurpose scientific laboratories, advanced libraries, archaeological and heritage interpretation, a Children’s Museum, household museums and other forms of public engagement.
There were also attempts to connect archaeology with the life of the contemporary village.
The idea was that heritage should not become something imposed upon Pattanam from outside. The local community, its landscape, ecology and everyday life had to remain part of the story. This included initiatives in Green Archaeology, entrepreneurial ventures, responsible tourism, environmental awareness, local participation and heritage-sensitive development.
The goal was to develop Pattanam as a model site where archaeology, science, education, environment, professional opportunities and the people of Pattanam could exist in a living relationship.
The decade-long interruption
After a decade of excavation and research, the programme was disrupted in 2016.
Several initiatives were stopped, interrupted or left unrealised. The international residential diploma did not continue. The Children’s Museum and scholarship programme were discontinued. Plans for an $8 million multipurpose archaeo-science laboratory associated with the Palace Museum in Beijing did not materialise. The proposed in-situ museum around the ancient harbour complex, including the six-metre wooden canoe, and the Muziris Museum also remained unfinished.
A programme for purchasing archaeologically significant plots from local landowners had resulted in the purchase of more than eight acres, but did not continue.
Other plans — for an archaeological park, advanced library, academic campus, interpretation centres and community-oriented facilities — likewise remained incomplete or were not pursued further.
The result was an unfortunate gap in the continuous development of Pattanam research between 2016 and 2026.
The important question now is how the research and allied activities can be resumed.
The establishment of the PAMA Institute for the Advancement of Transdisciplinary Archaeological Sciences in 2018 was an attempt to keep the intellectual and scientific enquiry alive.
PAMA (paternal and maternal ancestry) grew out of a broader intellectual vision shaped by scholars such as Romila Thapar, K.N. Panikkar and R.V.G. Menon, as well as the international network of scholars involved in Pattanam research.
PAMA’s purpose was to maintain a space in which archaeology could converse with history, anthropology, genetics, geology, environmental studies, conservation and other disciplines, and where evidence could continue to be questioned and explored through field research and internships.
PAMA subsequently obtained excavation permissions from the Archaeological Survey of India for 2019-20 and 2021-22.
With self-generated resources, six further trenches — 62 to 67 — were excavated at Pattanam between 2020 and 2023. It also undertook nearly a dozen trial trenches at Mathilakam in 2019 and conducted explorations in Idukki district in 2022.
The excavations at Pattanam also produced remarkable discoveries, including a head statue identified as the Roman Emperor Domitian, and a ring-stone resembling the Greek sphinx, identified by specialists as closely related to early Roman imperial ring-stone traditions.
PAMA helped keep that wider research network alive until 2023.
Reimagining Pattanam
Pattanam sits within an archaeological landscape that brings together evidence of people speaking, trading and living across nearly forty linguistic and cultural worlds between approximately 300 BCE and 300 CE. Why should the response to such a place be limited to another excavation office or a conventional museum?
Could Pattanam eventually become a Viswa Bharathi of the 21st century, a living centre where archaeology, history, anthropology, genetics, geology, environmental science, conservation, technology, literature, languages and the arts intersect?
The idea is not to transplant a conventional university onto an archaeological site, but to build a global research and learning community that grows organically from the landscape and works in partnership with its people.
Such an institution could bring researchers and students from India and abroad into sustained engagement with Pattanam’s archaeological record and its living environment. The ancient harbour, canoe, workshops, pottery, metals and biological remains would serve not merely as exhibits, but as starting points for exploring human mobility, technology, ecology, trade, language and social life. The village and the Periyar’s changing landscape would be integral to this process, offering opportunities to study how communities and environments have evolved.
A Viswabharathi of 21st century
An autonomous Pattanam Heritage Authority could provide an appropriate institutional framework. Its distant ambition could be much larger: a 21st-century Viswa Bharathi at Pattanam/Muziris — a global centre of multidisciplinary research and learning rooted in a Keralam village and in the extraordinary human connections preserved beneath it.
The Pattanam archaeological record belongs to the people who lived there 2,000 years ago, to those who live there today, and to generations yet to come.
(P. J. Cherian is Director of Pattanam Excavations and Explorations, 2006-2023; pamatatas@gmail.com)