Description

The Harappan or the Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished in South Asia during the 3rd millennium BCE., is not only about large cities, vast expansion and the production and international trade of shiny Harappan-style crafts. The culture-historical thinking that has long influenced the researchers involved with the Indus Civilization has often failed to acknowledge the existence of varied regional economies, and symbiotic relationships between the rural and urban population that helped the Indus civilization to sustain and maintain its glory. The glorious aspect of the Indus Civilization is known to almost everyone interested in ancient civilizations, but how the local regional populations and micro-cultures within the broad umbrella of the Indus Civilizations have sustained themselves and maintained a harmonic interaction with the so-called elite urban population is an aspect of the Indus Civilization which is still poorly known. A number of recent studies influenced by ‘bottom-up’ models have started to focus on the rural settlements in order to understand the changes in the environment and the sustainability of the Indus Civilization, but, only a very few have looked into the economy and adaptation to the regional environment of these rural settlements. My study is one of these very few attempts that attempt to understand the rural economy, regional interaction, and environmental adaptation of a peripheral region of the Indus Civilization.

In order to decipher the rural lifestyle during the Indus Age, this study had to depend on a number of proxy methods, the application of these methods to the Indus is still in its infancy. For example, through studying the stable isotopes from the tooth enamel of domesticated animals from the rural settlement of Kotada Bhadli, we have tried to understand how the residents of this settlement treated their animals, and to what extent this was dependent on the regional climate and availability of fodder. Through looking into the lipid residues of the foods that were cooked, stored and served in ceramic vessels, we have tried to evaluate how the residents of this settlement have exploited their domesticated animals and other resources available in the vicinity of the settlement. Kotada Bhadli completely lacked any indication of trade-oriented craft activities, but a huge deposition of fine ash at this settlement tells a different story of human activities involving fire. To understand the kind of human activities that may have produced such a huge amount of ash, we studied the phytoliths from the ash to determine the nature of the things that were burnt. The information these proxies reveal to us is interesting and quite different from what we already know in general about the Indus Civilization.

Kalyan Sekhar Chakraborty is an upper year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto. He completed his Master’s in Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology, Deccan College Post-graduate and Research Institute, Pune, India. He specializes in the Indus Valley Civilization, and the focus of his PhD research is the understanding of lifeways in one of the peripheries of the Indus Civilization, including the employment of isotopic and residue analyses, and other archaeological science methods. He has participated in a number of excavations in India and in Europe, where he incorporated photogrammetry and 3D imaging with other established excavation methods. He has presented his research in conferences held in India, the U.S. and Canada, and has published two papers in peer reviewed archaeological journals, and two chapters in edited volumes.