During 1987 and 1989, IW Ardika carried out a number of excavations in pottery-bearing sites on the coastal plain of north Bali, near the villages of Bangkah, Sembiran, Pacung and Julah. The results, especially those from Sembiran, were quite dramatic. Together with thousands of sherds of local pottery and a piece of a casting mould for making a bronze drum, Ardika excavated 79 sherds of the fine fabric type of South Asian Rouletted ware (78 from Sembiran and one from Pacung), together with a sherd of the stamped Black ware recorded as" Type 10" in the report on Arikamedu by Wheeler, Ghosh and Deva (1946), and a Black-slipped sherd of a much coarser fabric inscribed after firing with a three-character graffito in Kharoshthi. The background to this research, its significance for Indian and Southeast Asian contacts 2000 years ago and details of the finds are all given in a published report (Ardika and Bellwood 1991) and in Ardika's Ph. D. thesis submitted to the Australian National University (Ardika 1991).

The purpose of this short note is simply to put on record an extremely interesting discovery concerning the South Asian Rouletted ware. The results of X-ray diffraction analysis and neutron activation analysis indicate that the analyzed fabrics of Rouletted ware from Sembiran and Pacung, together with comparative samples from Arikamedu and Karaikadu in Tamil Nadu and Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka, all have one geological source in terms of their clay and temper compositions. This comes as a surprise, since Begley (1988) has recently noted the existence, on visual grounds only, of at least two fabrics of the fine Rouletted ware in India …