ABSTRACT
Archaeologically retrieved data and their contexts have normally been used to reconstruct the ‘culture’ which produced them. Yet the archaeologist’s ‘culture’ has little or no information for a social anthropologist (Leach 1973). I do not propose any means of bridging this gap, but wish to record a simple ethnographic feature of a cult in a community in West Bengal, with the hope that similar studies from cross-cultural contexts might enable us to develop generalizations. This, in turn, may provide a deeper understanding of the varieties of terracottas known from prehistoric contexts in India and elsewhere.
