Evolution

The Harappan State: Was it or Wasn't it?

Recent discussions on the nature of early state societies have led some scholars to suggest that the early urban phenomenon of the Indus Civilization should not be characterized as a state level society. This paper will critically examine these arguments in the context of current studies of the Indus Civilization and recent excavations at Harappa, Pakistan.

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Landscapes of Urbanization and De-Urbanization: A Large-Scale Approach to Investigating the Indus Civilization’s Settlement Distributions in Northwest India

Adam S. Green

A complex meta-analysis of data in a corner of northwestern India for what it can tell us about settlement patterns during the ancient Indus period and just after, when a host of factors, including possibly climate change, seem to have contributed to a re-allocation of populations between types of settlements.

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Royal "Chariot" Burials of Sanauli near Delhi and Archaeological Correlates of Prehistoric Indo-Iranian Languages

Asko Parpola

Another important and recent (October 2020) paper by Asko Parpola. He examines the 2018 finds from the Late Harappan site of Sanauli near Delhi in light of his research on early Indo-Aryan languages in the subcontinent and their origin in Central Asia.

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Interaction Systems, Specialized Crafts and Culture Change: The Indus Valley Tradition and the Indo-Gangetic Tradition in South Asia

Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

The author focuses primarily on economic interaction networks and specialised crafts to show how they can provide a window on the other changes that may have been occurring.

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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.

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Pastoralism, climate change, and the transformation of the Indus Civilization in Gujarat: Faunal analyses and biogenic isotopes

Brad Chase

An important paper - given the painstaking analysis of data - which shows just how careful one has to be in attributing the demise of the Indus civilization to climate change.

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Harappa: New Discoveries on its Origins and Growth

Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

Recently, a program of systematic surface surveys and small-scale excavations has been implemented at sites in the hinterland around Harappa. Initial results of these complementary research strategies are changing our understanding of the nature of Indus urbanism in the Punjab and have implications for the overall structure of the Indus Civilization.

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Mapping Archaeology While Mapping an Empire: Using Historical Maps to Reconstruct Ancient Settlement Landscapes in Modern India and Pakistan

Cameron A. Petrie

Science is slowly transforming ancient Indus studies, from DNA analysis of skeletons that point to migration and disease, to isotope analysis that reveals the distant origins of raw materials. One of the cleverest – and potentially rewarding i terms of increasing the number of ancient sites to investigate – must be the use of old maps.

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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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Indus Urbanism: New Perspectives on its Origin and Character

Jonathan Mark Kenoyer

During the past two decades a variety of archaeological research projects focused on the Indus civilization have made it possible to refine earlier models regarding the origin and character of this distinctive urban society.

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