Ancient Indus Valley Civilization Articles

364 peer-reviewed articles from leading journals about the latest discoveries about the ancient Indus civilization, its antecedents and contemporaries in the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia, during the Bronze Age 3500-1700 BCE by the world's ancient Indus archaeologists and scholars.

Were the Cretulae (Clay Sealings) from the Indus Port Town of Lothal Part of an Administrative Archive? Contextual, Interpretive, and Comparative Evidence

Dennys Frenez

"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.

New radiocarbon dates of human tooth enamel reveal a late appearance of farming life in the Indus Valley

Benjamin Mutin

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.

Bronze Age cymbals from Dahwa: Indus musical traditions in Oman

Khaled A. Douglas

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.

The So-Called Stupa Mound at Mohenjo Daro and its Relationship with the Ancient Citadel

Giovanni Verardi

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.

Taphonomy and labour at the Indus Valley site of Harappa (3700–1300 BC)

Nathaniel James

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."

Faking it? X-Ray Diffraction Analysis of Beads from Kotada Badli Reveals Evidence for Imitation Steatite in Harappan Gujarat

Brad Chase

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 and inequality: Comparing the “means of specification” in the early cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus civilization

Adam S. Green

"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.

Feeding ancient cities in South Asia: dating the adoption of rice, millet and tropical pulses in the Indus civilisation

Cameron A. Petrie

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.

Sabarmati and its connection with the Harappan port Lothal and the Nal corridor: A study using multi-sensor data, cloud-computing and multi-platforms

Ekta Gupta

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.

A Bronze Age Inland Water Network and Its Role in the Maritime Trade Network of the Harappan (Indus) Civilization

Ekta Gupta

Lothal was part of an important inland system of navigable pathways that traversed the whole adjoining region, possibly even extending towards Mohenjo-daro.

Mohenjo-daro and Interregional Connections in the Indus Civilization: Evidence from Inscribed Seals

Gregg M. Jamison

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.

Invisible Value or Tactile Value? Steatite in the Faience Complexes of the Indus Valley Tradition

Heather M.L. Miller

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.

Proto-Elamite Writing in Iran

Francois Desset

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.

Counter-intuitive influence of Himalayan river morphodynamics on Indus Civilisation urban settlements

Ajit Singh

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.

Artifact Reuse and Mixed Archaeological Contexts in Chatrikhera, Rajasthan

Teresa R. Raczek

"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

On the Development of Indus Technical Virtuosity and Its Relation to Social Structure

Massimo Vidale

This paper focusses on "the distinctive Indus characteristic of inventing and diffusing elaborated techniques for the production of small, valuable objects, especially ornaments."

Early Villages from Baluchistan to Western Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat

Dilip K. Chakrabarti

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.

The Story of an Ancient Dock: Lothal in the History of the Indian Ocean

Shereen Ratnagar

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.

Inscribed Unicorn Seals from Bagasra, Gujarat: A Comparative Analysis of Morphology, Carving Styles, and Distribution Patterns

Gregg M. Jamison

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.

Beas Landscape and Settlement Survey: Harappan Sites at Dunyapur/Lodhran – Punjab, Pakistan

Rita P. Wright

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.

Domestic food practice and vessel-use at Salūt-ST1, central Oman, during the Umm an-Nar period

Akshyeta Suryanarayan

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 Blade Implements and their Role in the Harappan Chalcolithic Cultural Development in Gujarat

Charusmita Gadekar

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."

Markers and agencies of anisotropy in the Indus sign system

M. V. Bhaskar

"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.

The Harappan ‘Veneer’ and the Forging of Urban Identity

Mary A. Davis

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’.

Who Were the ‘Massacre Victims’ at Mohenjo-daro? A Craniometric Investigation

Brian E. Hemphill

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.

Archaeological Field Research in Pakistan since Independence: An overview

M. Rafique Mughal

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.

Holocene people and sea-level changes along the northern coast of the Arabian Sea (Pakistan)

Paolo Biagi

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.

The Origins of the Indus Civilization

M. Rafique Mughal

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.

Fish Symbolism in Indus Valley Epigraphy and Protohistoric Accounts

Shamashis Sengupta

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."

The Short-Horned Bull on the Indus Seals: a Symbol of the Families in the Western Trade?

Massimo Vidale

A superb, thought-provoking paper by one of the most imaginative and interesting of ancient Indus archaeologists, able to reconcile the bigger picture with data and suppositions that often fit together very nicely. They certainly do in this paper.

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Ancient Indus Valley Civilization Articles

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