Harappa

Heterarchic Powers in the Ancient Indus Cities

This thoughtful and enlightening paper starts with a clear statement of the writer's point-of-view: "On the other hand, to keep writing that Indus society in the 3rd millennium BC was uniform, acephalous, egalitarian and classless, that it was not a state, that its people rejected violence, elites

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Indus zoomorphism and its avatars

M. V. Bhaskar

A technical paper which rewards the follower with valuable insights and serves, on a platter as it were, some complex puzzles in Indus iconography for further cogitation to the reader.

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Multi-cropping, Intercropping and Adaptation to Variable Environments in Indus South Asia

Cameron A. Petrie

A comprehensive look at what we know about agricultural strategies during the ancient Indus period, and how truly varied and sophisticated these most likely were, with careful adaptation to local conditions and water availability.

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

Cameron A. Petrie

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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