Synopsis The essays in this volume are an attempt to tease out from the scant archaeological (and to some extent historical) sources available, some information on certain aspects of rural societies in the past: mobility, subsistence from animal herding, symbiosis between crop production and animal rearing, situating hunters and gatherers, and the importance of forest as integral to rural life rather than the dichotomous ‘other’ of the field or village. There is also an attempt to bring out the ways in which tribal society, continuously misrepresented in academia today, laid the foundations of many aspects of Indian civilization in the remote past.