Ajay Pratap is a Professor of Ancient Indian History and a long-serving member of the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, Banaras Hindu University. He took an undergraduate degree in History from the prestigious St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, before attending the Deccan College, Pune University, for an M.A. in Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology. He was then an Inlaks Scholar to the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, for an M.Phil and a PhD in Archaeology. Besides two research projects involving rock art, he has taught various courses in Ancient Indian History, Tribal History, History of Ancient Science, Medicine and Technology and Research Methodology. His publications consist of four books and numerous research articles, chapters in edited volumes and book reviews covering ancient India, Indian archaeology, shifting cultivation, gender prehistory, the Harappan script, ancient astronomy and rock art. Most of his field research from the 1980s has been on indigenous communities and their subsistence systems, history and archaeology, focussing on the mountainous and hilly hinterlands of the Ganges Valley, like the Rajmahal Hills and the North Vindhyan ranges.