Ancient Indus Valley Civilization Articles

Dr. Heidi J. Miller discusses 18 previously unpublished ivory rods from Dr. George F. Dales's 1964–65 joint Pakistan Department of Archaeology/University of Pennsylvania season, excavated from a 20-meter square in the southwest corner of the HR mound. This is a large amount to have been discovered … >

A compact and thought-provoking piece by Dr. Asko Parpola, inspired by Dr. Heidi J. Miller's article New Ivory Rods from Mohenjo-daro and an Exploration of This Object Class presented at the 2014 Stockholm EASAA conference. He narrows the focus to rods with incised inscriptions — about 32 texts, 26… >

The case for Indus egalitarianism has rested on apparent absences: no palaces, no royal tombs, no exclusionary temples, no individual-aggrandizing art. Adam Green, who already argued in Killing the Priest-King that we should perhaps retire the assumption of Indus elites altogether, has long pushed … >

Picture a lane in Mohenjo-daro around 2300 BCE, a narrow, mudbrick-lined passages that still trace the lower town today, just as remarkable in their orderliness as the city's famous covered drains. Someone sets down a handful of small objects. >

The booklet Kot Diji published by the Department of Archaeology details the excavations carried out at the site of Kot Diji, located in the Khairpur district of Sindh about 40 km from Mohenjo-daro. >

The paper's central argument is straightforward and important: the wheeled bullock cart of the Indus Valley was an indigenous invention, not a technology diffused from Mesopotamia or Central Asia, as earlier colonial-era scholars once assumed. >

Rita P. Wright, an archaeologist with long experience understanding the Indus areas around Harappa (see the Beas Settlement and Land Survey) looks at the complex evidence surrounding the decline of Indus civilization at the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium (around 2000 BCE and afterwards). >

This article, which has received widespread press coverage, provides a detailed climate and hydrological reconstruction of the Indus (Harappan) civilization, focusing on how cycles of river drought and fluctuating monsoon rainfall influenced its trajectory. >

Were there palaces at Mohenjo-daro? This article examines the social implications associated with historical architecture. The presence of centralized "palaces" suggests a social stratification including an elite class. >

"We drove eastward for another half mile into the Shadi Kaur Valley. There the trail just disappeared. After winding througha mosaic of sand hills, we came to the service road connecting Pasni with a new water-pumping station. But the station marked the end of that road too, so we drove cross-count… >

During the second half of the 3rd millennium BC, the Harappan Civilization covered an area of over one million square kilometers in South Asia, from the Afghan highlands to western India. Excavations at large urban sites like Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and Dholavira, as well as at smaller production si… >

Things were never simple in Indus times. This excellent paper neatly summarizes what we know about ancient Indus agricultural strategies in the face of diverse local conditions and possibly radical climate changes about 4,000 years ago. >

One day Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be of great help in reading ancient Indus inscriptions. There are likely to be many steps before we get there however. >

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. >