The study from Frontiers in Medicine, March 2025 presents the first paleopathological evidence for lepromatous leprosy in Bronze Age Oman (2500–2000 BCE), specifically at the site of Dahwa.
"Once considered in all their components, clay sealings can in fact be key objects for understanding several aspects of the socio-economic organisation of the Indus Civilization," writes the author of this important recent paper built on years of work and thinking about the unique Lothal sealing trove he has done so much to help us understand.
This is an extremely important paper, just published in Nature. It completely scrambles timelines around South Asia and the development of agriculture in the region.
Sometimes you have to find something far away to understand something nearby. This seems to be the case with the discovery of a complete set of copper cymbals in Oman, which have allowed archaeologists to be much more sure that similar finds of only one cymbal in Mohenjo-daro and elsewhere were actually musical instruments.
What was really going on at the so-called stupa mound in Mohenjo-daro? This important paper by Giovanni Verardi and Federica Barba challenges the long-standing interpretation of the so-called Stupa Mound at Mohenjo Daro, as a Buddhist stupa dating to the 2nd century AD.
This is a complex paper that addresses an important issue in the emergence of cities during the Bronze Age: how were people in new and developing urban centers fed? As the authors put it crisply: "The populations of urban sites such as Harappa required substantial food supplies."
An intriguing article in the way it creates multiple openings in thinking about ancient Indus society. The subject is a set of three of four beads found at a rural "Sorath Harappan" site (2300-1900 BCE) in Gujarat.
"Debt lurks in the shadow of reciprocity," is the wonderful starting sentence of this paper. Highly theoretical, it opens up important questions about seals in the ancient Indus and Mesopotamian civilizations and their role in the system of administrative control which helped integrate society at the dawn of urban civilization.
An investigation of the agricultural practices that supported the rise of the Indus civilization by focusing on summer and winter crops used at settlements in the Rakhigarhi, Haryana area, particularly Masudpur VII and Masudpur I.
Was the ‘dockyard’ at Lothal a ‘dockyard’ or not? An in-depth look at this question in a true multi-dimensional manner is long overdue. This study seeks to revisit the dockyard hypothesis by examining Lothal from a landscape perspective, using advanced techniques such as multi-sensor remote sensing, cloud computing, and digital elevation models.
Lothal was part of an important inland system of navigable pathways that traversed the whole adjoining region, possibly even extending towards Mohenjo-daro.
One way to understand the connections between ancient Indus sites, often separated by enormous distances, is to look ever more closely at some of their smallest artefacts – in this case unicorn seals, usually merely 5 cm square.
It is really nice when an author posits a hypothesis, discusses why or why it may not be true, introduces another and then weighs them without necessarily strongly committing to either. In this case, Dr. Heather M. L.
Early writing or sign systems were fragile. They could disappear leaving seemingly little trace in the systems that followed. This is true of the ancient Indus sign system. It is also true of the proto-Elamite one.
This is a really important article in that it shows how modern scientific tools and techniques can be used to cast surprising light on the assumptions and conclusions [myths?] that are often drawn from the limited set of evidence archaeologists have to work with.
"Studying the reuse and recycling of artifacts in contemporary contexts aids in the understanding of such actions in the past," write the authors (p. 486), who provide ample evidence that this is the case and offer another lens through which one can interrogate archaeological findings
This paper focusses on "the distinctive Indus characteristic of inventing and diffusing elaborated techniques for the production of small, valuable objects, especially ornaments."
There are not many comprehensive summaries of the development of agriculture in the western subcontinent. This 50 page piece from the book History of Ancient India II: Protohistoric Foundations (2014) is a welcome exception and explores the development of early agricultural villages from Balochistan to Gujarat and their role in the rise of the Harappan Civilization.
Shereen Ratnagar writes with a crystalline, no-nonsense intelligence about Lothal and its famous "dockyard" in a way that both uplifts and contextualizes this strange feature of a relatively small Harappan site.
The substantial article examines seven inscribed unicorn steatite seals from the Indus site of Bagasra (Gola Dhoro), in Gujarat. These seals are important for understanding the craft industry of the Indus Civilization.
Often archaeology is all about digging deep, trying to get to the bottom layers on a site, intensively recording depths and detail. Sometimes it is about casting a wider net, in this case a larger area near an old bed of the Beas River in Punjab.
A Sherlock Holmes-style investigation into over four thousand year old pots to determine, as best as modern lipid residue analysis allows, the foodstuffs that they once held to draw a bigger and better picture of food practices on the Arabian Gulf during the so-called Umm an-Nar period (ca. 2700-2000 BCE). Many of these pots were imported ancient Indus Black-Slipped Jars.
Lithic (stone) tools were the machine tools of the Bronze Age. This very well-written article shows how "the study of stylistic difference and technological continuities and discontinuities observed in lithic assemblages at ancient sites can provide important new information regarding the spread and development of Harappan Civilization as well as about other regional Chalcolithic cultures."
"This paper reports a broad range of new observations about sign behaviour in relation to and independently of animal behaviour on Indus seal-impressions," writes the author.
This thought-provoking paper explores the widespread similarity and standardization in material culture across the Indus Valley Civilization, termed by others as the ‘Harappan Veneer’.
This 40 page paper presents an in-depth analysis aiming to elucidate the biological affiliations of individuals found in atypical burial contexts at Mohenjo-daro through craniometric studies.
This 1990 article from the Deccan College Bulletin's Memorial volume for H.D. Sankalia, an eminent Indian archaeologist, is a summary in one place of the archaeological work done in Pakistan after 1947. Much of this is relevant to wider than national boundaries.
This paper develops a key theme relating to the origins of the ancient Indus civilization – the very different geographical reality in the Indus delta and the Arabian coast in the millennia preceding its rise.
As Dr. Rafique Mughal leads the first major excavation at the site of Ganweriwala in the Cholistan desert – an exceptionally exciting development in ancient Indus archaeology – it is well worth reviewing his earlier papers, many of which were published in Pakistani archaeological journals forty or more years ago.
The writer, who teaches at CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay in France, has come up with a paper rich in historical and epigraphical associations that complexify and simplify thinking about one of the most important signs on Indus seals, "nearly ten percent of all textual matter."
