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. 2022 Aug 9;12(1):13559.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-17910-9.

Geochemical provenance of an Indo-Arabian stone anchor from Manikapatna highlights the medieval maritime trade of India

Sila Tripati  1 , Jyotiranjan S Ray  2   3 , Rudra Prasad Behera  4 , Prakash Babu  1 , Milan Kumar Mahala  5 , Murali Kocherla  1 , Vijay Khedekar  1
Affiliations

Geochemical provenance of an Indo-Arabian stone anchor from Manikapatna highlights the medieval maritime trade of India

Sila Tripati et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

India is one of the oldest maritime nations in the world, and the overseas contacts date back to the third millennium BCE. Besides several archaeological vestiges, numerous stone anchors of various types have been documented during maritime archaeological explorations along the Indian littoral. During a recent maritime archaeological exploration, a broken Indo-Arabian stone anchor, of the Medieval period, was discovered along the Manikapatna coast of Odisha, Indian eastern littoral. In an attempt to determine the provenance of the anchor, we carried out a detailed petrographic, geochemical (major/trace elements) and Sr-Nd isotopic investigation. The results of our study reveal that the stone of the anchor had been cut out of a geologically young, vesicular, subalkalic basalt lava flow. Source fingerprinting done using petrographic, geochemical and isotopic data, suggests that contrary to the general perception, the anchor rock did not come from any local rock formations. All data point to the most likely scenario that the anchor rock was sourced from one of the lava flows of the Deccan Traps at Palitana in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, western India. This result confirms the existence of Medieval maritime trading between western and eastern Indian states.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Stone Anchor sites of India.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Figure showing the location of Manikapatna and nearby localities around the Chilika Lake, state of Odisha, India.
Figure 3
Figure 3
(A) Indo-Arabian broken stone anchor found at Manikapatna on Chilika Lake, Odisha; (B) Likely outline of the original anchor, reconstructed based on similar anchors found elsewhere.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Architectural remains (A) and Chinese pottery found at Manikapatna, along with the stone anchor (B).
Figure 5
Figure 5
(A) Photomicrograph of a thin section of the sample chip from the Chilika Anchor showing plagioclase laths (plag), clino pyroxene (cpx) and dark iron oxides (ox). The texture seen is typical of a basaltic lava; (B) Anchor basalt datum (green square) plotted on a total alkali silica (TAS) diagram (Le Bas et al., 1986). The Boundary line between the alkalic and subalkalic field is by Irvine and Baragar (1971). Also plotted are data for lava flows of Palitana, Gujarat, India (data source: Sheth et al., 2013).
Figure 6
Figure 6
εNd(0) versus 87Sr/86Sr of the Chilika Anchor rock compared with the same for the Deccan Traps (Basu et al., 2020), basalts of north-eastern Africa and Arabian peninsula (Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Yemen; Kieffer et al., 2004 and references therein), basalts of southern Iran (Yeganehfar et al., 2013), and basaltic flows of Rajmahal and Sylhet Traps.
Figure 7
Figure 7
(A) CaO versus SiO2 and (B) TiO2 versus SiO2 for the Chilika Anchor rock compared with the data for Palitana lava flows (data source: Sheth et al., 2013).
Figure 8
Figure 8
Cross plots of Nb vs. TiO2 (A) and Ti/Y vs. Zr/Nb (B) for the Chilika Anchor rock compared with the data for Palitana lava flows (data source: Sheth et al., 2013).
Figure 9
Figure 9
(A) Primitive Mantle normalized trace element pattern and (B) Chondrite normalized rare earth element pattern for the Chilika Anchor rock (green squares) compared with those for Palitana lava flows (data source: Sheth et al., 2013). Normalizing values are from Sun and McDonough (1989).
Figure 10
Figure 10
(A) εNd(0) versus 87Sr/86Sr and (B) εNd(t = 66 Ma) versus Zr/Y for the Chilika Anchor rock compared with the data for the Palitana lava flows (data source: Sheth et al., 2013).
Figure 11
Figure 11
Map of peninsular India showing distribution of the Youngest (Cretaceous) Basaltic Volcanism in India: ~ 116 Ma Rajmahal-Sylhet Traps; ~ 66 Ma Deccan Traps. Locations of the discovery site Manikapatna and the source rock locality, Palitana in Gujarat, are marked.
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