Image: Charred wheat seeds found at Mohenjo-daro
Things were never simple in Indus times. This excellent paper neatly summarizes what we know about ancient Indus agricultural strategies in the face of diverse local conditions and possibly radical climate changes about 4,000 years ago. What the authors find is that there were both monocultures, one crop likely grown to serve the needs of larger urban populations in Harappa, Rakigarhi and Mohenjo-daro, and intercropping, duo-cultures, and flexible crop selection in Gujarat and elsewhere to respond to specific local and regional conditions. In the former case wheat and barley, the latter millets for example. This research challenges traditional narratives about societal "collapse" caused by the 4.2kya climate event and demonstrates how different agricultural strategies influenced urban and rural resilience during environmental and social upheaval. Regional strategies varied dramatically. This would have meant that complex social and economic models were features of Indus civilization, not more single simple ones that are so easy to posit from this great a distance in time.
Even a single location was subject to nuance. After noting how "best archaeobotanical data for an Indus city come from Harappa. Eighty per cent of the 250 000 seeds so far analysed from Harappa are cereal grains (Weber 1999, 2003; Weber et al. 2010), Bates and Choi continue: "Crop choices at Harappa fluctuated over time. Barley was the dominant crop during the Early Harappan phase, wheat predominated in the Harappan phase, then barley took over again in the Late Harappan (Weber 2003: tab. 5.3.c). Kharif crops, particularly millets, also increase over time, although at no point do they represent more than seven per cent of the assemblage (Weber 2003; also Petrie & Bates 2017). Weber (2003: 181–89) has argued that an increased diversity over time was perhaps due to adaptation to changing climate, but as noted in Petrie and Bates (2017) there was little actual focus by farmers providing for Harappa on increasing yields through multicropping, and agriculture at Harappa predominantly focused on rabi monocultures of wheat and barley," (p. 1493).
Gujarati ancient Indus sites demonstrate remarkable agricultural flexibility on the other hand. At Rojdi, farmers employed multicropping strategies with millet-based systems that could shift between monocropping, intercropping, and maslin cultivation. Sites like Khirsara underwent dramatic transitions from 90% barley monoculture during Early Harappan times to predominantly kharif crops (pearl millet, rice, sorghum) by the Late Harappan phase. The northeast region around Rakigarhi maintained consistent sequential cropping patterns throughout all three Indus phases, utilizing mixed and various intercropping strategies without showing chronological stress patterns. It may well be that Rakigarhi's abandonment during the decline of Indus civilization between 1900 and 1700 BCE had to do with its monocultural dependence, whereas villages in the region exploited more resilient and adaptive crop strategies – and survived. At times, urban food demands may have pushed agricultural systems beyond sustainable ecological limits. At Khirsara in Haryana, the early emphasis on barley monoculture was "ill-suited to local environmental conditions," suggesting that pan-regional economic pressures for large rabi cereals during urbanization may have compromised local adaptation strategies.
The study's strength lies in this comparative regional approach to examine agricultural decision-making across diverse ecological zones. The authors skillfully integrate archaeobotanical data with theoretical frameworks about risk mitigation and agricultural intensification, providing an alternative to simple climate-collapse narratives. At the same time they remain open to new data given how much work still needs to be done. One also wonders how individual farmers interacted with supra-regional economic demands or which mechanisms existed for them to resist or adapt to urban food requirements. What role did water management technologies (irrigation and storage) play in enabling different agricultural strategies across regions? How did social hierarchy and wealth distribution influence access to diverse agricultural strategies? It would also be interesting to compare Indus agricultural strategies with contemporary Bronze Age civilizations facing similar environmental pressures in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Aegean region.
This research fundamentally challenges deterministic climate-collapse narratives by demonstrating that human agency, agricultural decision-making, and regional diversity played big roles in shaping responses to environmental change. It helps create the framework for further research and studies that will lead to a far richer vision of Indus societies than even emerges here. Indeed one can only marvel at how what was for so long something of a single integrated Indus polity incorporated so much agricultural and economic diversity.