Harappa

Diversity, variability, adaptation and ‘fragility’ in the Indus Civilization

A superb framing of how we might think of the Indus civilization and its evolution as a larger entity in comparison and contrast with other ancient civilizations. How did Indus cities fit into a rural context? Were they ruled by elites? How did they manage to survive so long?

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Heritage, Archaeology and the Indus Civilization

Sudeshna Guha

Dr. Guha goes through the epistemology governing each period's research and framing of the Indus Civilization with respect to those civilizations around, and those closer to home.

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Bioarchaeology of the Indus Valley Civilization: Biological Affinities, Paleopathology, and Chemical Analyses

Nancy Lovell

"In spite of the challenges that face bioarchaeological research in South Asia, the results obtained from the investigations of the past 30 years have revolutionized our understanding of the peoples of the ancient Indus Valley, providing contemporary, scientifically informed interpretations from skeletal collections that were often collected decades ago."

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The Indus Script: Invention and Use of a Bronze Age Writing System

Dennys Frenez

A well-illustrated 140 slide PDF that explores the Indus script, origins, writing direction and more. While the slides by Indus scholar Dennys Frenez lack his narration, many of the slides are self-explanatory and provide a rich visual overview of the Indus civilization its writing and the many issues involved.

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Decolonizing South Asia through Heritage- and Nation-Building

Sudeshna Guha

"British scholarship of Indian history during the colonial period produced an essentialist construct of an Indian cultural tradition that was deemed unchanged since antiquity and recoverable through archaeological excavations" (p.

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Material Culture and Childhood in Harappan South Asia

Supriya Varma

A comprehensive roundup of all that we seem to know about toys in the ancient Indus Valley from The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood

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Indus Administrative Technology - New Insights on Harappan Stamp Seals and their Impressions on Clay Tags

Dennys Frenez

A richly illustrated slide journey through seals and sealings, how and why they were used in other ancient civilizations, and primarily what we might know and deduce about their use in ancient Indus cities. Dennys Frenez has been studying a large group of accidentally fired Lothal sealings for many years, and is joined by other distinguished archaeologists in what was originally a symposium on bead and seal technologies at the University of Padua, Italy, in 2019.

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Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

Adam S. Green

A provocative paper which claims that "the Indus civilization reveals that a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity" (p. 1). The author, who is at Cambridge University where he has long been involved with the groundbreaking Two Rains project, starts with John Marshall and other

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The Indus Script: Origins, Use and Disappearance

Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

"The contexts of script and changes in the writing over time indicate that the Indus script was versatile and that it was probably used to communicate complex ideas as well as multiple languages.

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Origin and Development of the Indus Script: Insights from Harappa and other sites

Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

This comprehensive look at the development of the Indus script makes a clear and cogent case that its origins likely can be traced to the pre and post-firing graffiti marks found on pottery throughout the region.

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