Posts on recent and historic ancient Indus excavations.
November 21st, 2016
Latest research on archaeological sites of the ancient Indus Civilisation, which stretched across what is now Pakistan and northwest India during the Bronze Age, has revealed that domesticated rice farming in South Asia began far earlier than previously believed.
September 25th, 2016
"The centralized planning of the Harappan settlements," writes the archaeologist write Dilip Chakrabarti, "is one of their most famous features."
September 19th, 2016
Few things better represent the power of ancient Indus cities in their time - much like subways and digital switches do modern cities - than brick drains. Five drains that could from Harappa and Mohenjo-daro show that the volume of water that flowed through these structures must have been like nothing seen before by ancient wayfarers.
John Marshall writes: "A remarkable feature of the city of Mohenjo-daro is the very elaborate drainage system that exists even in the poorest quarters of the city.
September 17th, 2016
Ramprasad Chanda, was "one of the best archaeologists that the Survey [of India] had trained under their scholarship scheme," and organizer of one of the first Indus exhibitions at the Indian Museum in Kolkata in 1924.
September 11th, 2016
If we may fantasize about where ancient Indus archaeology could go online, one need not look farther than the City of Ur project.
September 4th, 2016
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the excavator of the wall shown here, wrote that ". . . . both Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were dominated by am embattled acropolis or citadel, occupying a marginal block and built up with mud and mud-brick to a height of forty or fifty feet above the featureless lain with a revetment of backed brick. Upon this acropolis were ritual buildings and places of assembly.
By Nadine Zubair August 26th, 2016
The film Mohenjo Daro opens in the remote village of Amri, where Sarman (Hrithik Roshan) and his friends wrestle a large crocodile in a riverine gorge. Amri is shown as a remote farming village from where the villagers travel to Mohenjodaro as it offers a bigger market for their wares. In this post we shine a light on the archaeological evidence from the ancient site of Amri, which lies on the western bank of the Indus, about 160 km south of Mohenjodaro.
The archaeological importance of Amri was demonstrated in 1929 by the excavations of N.G.Majumdar, who discovered there, for the first time,
August 6th, 2016
A revealing story about Rakigarhi highlights how, like in the case of Mohenjo-daro, the challenges of preserving ancient Indus cities even after they are discovered, remain enormous.
By StephanieV. August 5th, 2016
Discarded ancient Indus sherds, after archaeologists have sifted through them and cleaned them. This pottery debris from excavations at Harappa covers hundreds - if not a thousand – years of habitation, far longer a period than say modern times. One can imagine each sherd having its own story, connected to another sherd now far away in the pile, the centuries layered upon each other in the sunlight.
1 and 2. Sorted and discarded pottery sherds from continuing excavations at Harappa since 1985.
3. Earth and debris excavated from the houses and streets of DK-I area was dumped directly onto parts
June 26th, 2016
Exciting new discoveries through 2015 at Salut tower in Oman show how extensive Indus trade and relationships with this area were during the Bronze Age (2500-2000 BCE).
