
Author: Nayanjot Lahiri
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 410
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8175300345
Description
This work constitutes essential reading for all who are interested in the decline and al of India's first civilization.
In September 1924 John Marshall announced a momentous archaeological discovery: the civilization of the Indus valley. This phenomenon has become more generally known as the Indus or Harappan civilization. Names like Mohenjodaro and Harappa have been assimilated into India's cultural heritage and the Indus civilization remains among the most popular and researched themes in the archaeology of India.
Marshall's understanding of that discovery was to radically alter perception of the antiquity of urban efflorescence in the Indian subcontinent. Soon after, the Indus yielded a slow flood of fierce disagreements concerning the trajectory of its urban evolution, its cultural form, and its decline. Perhaps the fiercest of all these debates, which continues to rage, is about the real reasons for the end of city culture within this civilization. Did the cities dramatically collapse or was there a steady urban decline? Was the decline and fall of this civilization a result of inroads by certain notorious Aryans? Or should the idea of these invasions be relegated to the world of mythology? How did rivers, earthquakes an climatic shifts contribute to the process of disintegration? Was the end of the civilization marked by a cultural fracture? Or id its tradition persist?
The key scholarly interventions which cover a these questions and disputes have been reproduced within this volume. The readings included range from essays going back to the 1920s to those that have appeared over the past decade. The issues, the hypotheses, and the questions raised by archaeologists, scientists and historians all find place in this meticulously compiled book. The readings are prefaced by a long new introduction by the editor outlining the history, developments and complexities of the subject.
THE EDITOR: Nayanjot Lahiri teaches Archaeology at the Department of History, Delhi University. She is the author of Pre-Ahom Assam and the Archaeology of Indian Trade Routes. She has published scholarly articles in various journals including The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain.
Contents
Introduction
I. INDUS CITIES AND THE ARYANS: HISTORICAL CONQUERORS, MYTHICAL MARAUDERS OR VEDIC HARAPPANS?
FIRST FORMULATIONS: CHANDA VS. CHANDA
The Indus Valley in the Vedic Period
The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins
Survival of the Prehistoric Civilization of the Indus Valley
THE DEBATE CONTINUES
Harappa 1946: The Defences and Cemetery R37 R E M Wheeler
The Supposed Carnage of the City People by the Aryans
The Relation of Harappan Culture with the Rgveda
The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjodaro
It is Time to Rethink
Have Aryans been Identified in the Prehistoric Skeletal Record from South Asia? Biological Anthropology and Concepts of Ancient Races
Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia
II. ENVIRONMENT AND COLLAPSE
SILT AND SEDIMENT: EVIDENCE AND INTERPRETATION
Chanhu-daro Excavations
Lothal: A Harappan Port Town
Bio-geological Evidence Bearing on the Decline of the Indus Valley Civilization
The Indus Flood Plain and the Indus Civilization
The Consequences of River Changes for the Harappan Settlements in Cholistan
Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes
Remote Sensing of the Lost Saraswati River
High-resolution Holocene Environmental Changes in the Thar Desert, Northwestern India
Climate, a Factor in the Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization-Evidence from Rajasthan and Beyond
THE IMPACT OF HARAPPANS ON THE ENVIRONMENT
The Origin, Character and Decline of an early
Civilization
III. FROM A CITY CIVILIZATION TO A PHASE OF DEVOLUTION
CONTINUITY OR CHANGE?
The Late Harappans
Conquerors from the West
Excavation at Rangpur and Other Explorations in Gujarat
Survival? Revival? Import?
Dholavira
Late Harappan Settlements of Western India, with Special Reference to Gujarat
Continuity and Change in the North Kachi Plain (Baluchistan, Pakistan) at the Beginning of the Second Millennium BC
The Patterns and Problems in the History of Crops
Rice and Ragi at Harappa: Preliminary Results by Plant Opal Analysis
Raw Material Usage and Trade Routes
Bibliography
Endpapers: Material equipment of Rangpur and other Chalcolithic Sites.