INDUS VALLEY EVOLVED EVEN AS MONSOON DECLINED

HISTORY TALK - INDUS VALLEY EVOLVED EVEN AS MONSOON DECLINED

Climate Change Ended It, Finds IIT-ASI Study

It may be time to rewrite history textbooks. Scientists from IIT-Kharagpur and the Archaeological Survey of India have uncovered evidence that the Indus Valley Civilisation is at least 2,500 years older than believed, and a pre-Harappan civilisation existed for at least 1,000 years before it.

The discovery, published in the `Nature' journal on May 25, the `Nature' journal on May 25, may force a global rethink on the timelines of the so-called `cradles of civilisation'. So far, it was believed that the Indus Valley settlements date back 5,500 years. The scientists also believe they know why the civilisation ended around 3,000 ye ars ago -climate change.

 

“We have recovered perhaps the oldest pottery from the civilisation. We used a technique called `optically stimulated luminescence' to date pottery shards of the Early Mature Harappan time to nearly 6,000 years ago and the cultural levels of pre-Harappan Hakra phase as far back as 8,000 years,“ said Anindya Sarkar, head of the department of geology and geophysics at IIT-Kharagpur.“We unearthed evidence of different cultural levels that mark the progress of the civilisation. In the earliest stages people did not know how to build houses and dug pits in the ground in which they lived.Then, there is evidence of crude pottery and ornaments made by hand. In the later stages, more sophistication is seen -the jewellery is fire-baked,“ Sarkar added.

The team had set out to prove that the civilisation proliferated to other Indian sites like Bhirrana and Rakhigarhi in Haryana, apart from the known locations of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan and Lothal, Dholavira and Kalibangan in India. They took their dig to an unexplored site, Bhir rana -and ended up unearthing something much bigger. The excavation also yielded large quantities of animal remains like bones, teeth, horn cores of cow, goat, deer and antelope, which were put through Carbon 14 analysis to decipher antiquity and the climatic conditions in which the civilisation flourished, said Arati Deshpande Mukherjee of Deccan College, which helped analyse the finds along with Physical Research Laboratory , Ahmedabad.

The researchers believe that the Indus Valley Civilisation spread over a vast expanse of India -stretching to the banks of the now “lost“ Saraswati river or the Ghaggar-Hakra river -but this has not been studied enough because what we know so far is based on British excavations. “At the excavation sites, we saw preservation of all cultural levels right from the pre-Indus Valley Civilisation phase (9,000-8,000 years ago) through what we have categorised as Early Harappan (8,000-7,000 years ago) to the Mature Harappan times,“ said Sarkar.

The late Harappan phase witnessed large-scale de-urbanisation, drop in population, abandonment of established settlements, violence and even the disappearance of the Harappan script, the researchers say . The study re vealed that monsoon started weakening 7,000 years ago but, surprisingly , the civilisation did not disappear.

The Indus Valley people were very resolute and flexible and continued to evolve even in the face of declining monsoon. The people shifted their crop patterns from large-grained cereals like wheat and barley during the early part of intensified monsoon to drought-resistant species like rice in the latter part. As the yield diminished, the organised large storage system of the Mature Harappan period gave way to more individual household-based crop processing and storage systems that acted as a catalyst for the de-urbanisation of the civilisation rather than an abrupt collapse, they say .


May 29 2016 : The Times of India (Delhi)