The Indus Valley Mystery
One of the great civilizations of the ancient world -- that of the enigmatic people and cities of the Indus Valley -- grew from roots that reach deep into the past of Pakistan and India.
Articles on the evolution, growth and decline of urbanity and fluctuations or changes in over time within the ancient Harappan or Indus Valley Civilization and its antecedents.
Development of the Inter-regional Interaction System in the Indus Valley and Beyond - A Hypothetical View towards the Formation of an Urban Society -
"Urban society is a highly complex system in terms of its institutions, hierarchy, integration, etc." writes the author. "A vast region is incorporated into one social system which is based on cities."
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
The Ancient City of Harappa
The vast mounded remains of the ancient city of Harappa, one of the largest sites of the Indus Valley civilization, have been known by scholars for more than one hundred years. Occupied almost continuously for more than five thousand years, Harappa's ancient ruins represent the traces of one of the earliest cities of the world, and even today one-third of the area is still occupied by the modern and thriving city of Harappa.
‘We are inheritors of a rural civilisation’: rural complexity and the ceramic economy in the Indus Civilisation in northwest India
The relationship between ancient Indus centers - which we know best and consider a hallmark of the civilization - and the vast rural "hinterland" that surrounded them is the subject of this lucid paper.
Ideology and Legitimation in the Indus State as revealed through Symbolic Objects
Archaeologically preserved symbols in the form of artifacts and architecture are the primary category of data available to scholars studying the development of early state level society in South Asia.
Materializing Harappan identities: unity and diversity in the borderlands of the Indus Civilization
The authors take on the complex question of how Harappan or Indus culture made its presence felt in Gujarat from about the middle of the third millennium through the decline of Indus civilization six or seven hundred years later. How did Indus traditions as expressed in material culture and the manufacture of these objects relate to what we see in Indus cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa?
A Peaceful Realm? Trauma and social differentiation at Harappa
An analysis of a skeletal collection from Harappa contradicts the dehumanizing, unrealistic myth of the Indus Civilization as an exceptionally peaceful prehistoric urban civilization.
The Prehistory of Sindh and Las Bela (Balochistan): Thirty years of surveys and excavations (1985-2014)
It has really only been since the 1980s that a more comprehensive picture of the wide and deep roots of Indus civilization in the larger Sindh and Balochistan region have become apparent. Mehrgarh did not spring out of nowhere but was embedded in a region where fishing, shell collecting, flint mining and other crafts were present and flourishing at different times.
Reconstructing the History of Harappan Civilization
A detailed analysis of the evolution of Indus Civilization based on a compilation of the latest scientific data by experts.