Veerampattinam

Arikamedu

Four kilometres from Pondicherry is where India's trade with Rome stops being an abstraction. The digs here, by Mortimer Wheeler in 1945 and Jean-Marie Casal after him, turned up amphorae, Arretine ware, Roman lamps, glassware, gems and beads, and identified the place as Podouke, the port that both the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Ptolemy list as an emporium. Wheeler read it as a Yavana trading post of about two centuries; later work by Vimala Begley stretched the settlement from the 2nd century BCE to the 8th century CE. It reads as an archaeological site rather than a monument, so the pull is what came out of the ground.