Agriculture

Articles concerning agriculture in the ancient Indus civilization including crops and crop patterns, and how these might have affected the development of towns and culture.

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.

Looking beneath the Veneer Thoughts about Environmental and Cultural Diversity in the Indus Civilization

Cameron A. Petrie
"The recognition of variation and diversity [in the ancient Indus civilization] has encouraged a gradual, though not universally accepted, shift toward the interpretation that certain categories of Indus material acted as ‘a veneer… overlying diverse local and regional cultural expressions'," write the authors.

The Published Archaeobotanical Data from the Indus Civilisation, South Asia, c. 3200–1500 BC

Jennifer Bates
What did ancient Indus people eat? What kind of crops did they grow? What did they cook? How might these things differ by city, town and region? To even get close to answering these questions, one needs a "a systematic collation of all primary published macrobotanical data, regardless of their designation as ‘crop’, ‘fully domesticated’ or ‘wild/weedy’ species," writes author Jennifer Bates.

New evidence for early 4th millennium BP agriculture in the Western Himalayas: Qasim Bagh, Kashmir

Michael Spate
"The valleys of Kashmir and Swat in the Western Himalayan-Hindu Kush regions of India and Pakistan are home to an important prehistoric cultural complex beginning at around 5000 BP, loosely grouped as the “Northern Neolithic” (Coningham and Young, 2015), especially characterised by a rich agricultural tradition."