History proper, as we have it, is a matter of written records. But mankind has started his history long before it developed the system of writing. Man has left behind him traces of his existence: pottery, tools and weapons, which lie buried in the womb of the earth. These buried remains unearthed point out the records of thestages of his progress. With their help, archaeology has “extended history's view backward in time a hunderedfold. Archaeology is truly described as "a handmaid of history.” When in other countries archaeology is mainly, if not solely, concerned with pre-history, in India its contribution to the study of ancient and medieval periods excels anything else in importance and interest. It not only supplies a sure corrective to legends and myths but endows the legendary past with a historical basis where there is any. The great Maurya Emperor Asoka might have still remained a mythical monster of cruelty, reclaimed for humanity by the evangelical zeal of the Buddhist monks, but for Prinsep's ingenious reading of the unknown script of the rock and the pillar inscriptions.
Archaeology is a recent growth of Indian history. Professor M. Taddei has this to say: "Unlike classical archaeology, Indian archaeology has never shown a weakness for abstract systems of classification; nor has it ever regarded archaeological techniques as an end in themseleves and lost sight of its own first objective, that of writing the history of man. This is because in a country which has no historical literature nothing to be compared with the Chinese Imperial annals, still less with the Greek and Roman sources and the immense wealth of inscriptions which illuminate the world of classical antiquity archaeology is in practice the only available means of enquiry. Not only has archaeology introduced us to civilisations which were hitherto unknown, like the Indus Valley civilisation, but in much more recent periods as well like the case of Gandhara."