http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100406/jsp/nation/story_12307704.jsp#
Indus
Valley east theory challenged
G.S. MUDUR
New Delhi, April 5: A study of hundreds of ancient Indus Valley
civilisation sites has revealed previously unsuspected patterns
of growth and decline that challenge a long-standing idea of a
solely eastward-moving wave of Indus urbanisation.
Researchers at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS),
Chennai, combined data from archaeology, radiocarbon dating, and
river flows to study how settlements around the Indus Valley region
had evolved from around 7000 BC till 1000 BC.
Their analysis of 1,874 Indus region settlements has shown that
the Indus urbanisation had three epicentres Mehrgarh in
present-day Baluchistan, Gujarat, and sites along an ancient river
called the Ghaggar-Hakra in Haryana and Punjab.
The findings, published in Current Science, a journal of the
Indian Academy of Sciences, dispute suggestions by international
researchers that farming and urbanisation in the region was driven
by a wave of advance moving eastward.
Were looking at large-scale patterns of how the Indus
civilisation changed over time, said Ronojoy Adhikari, a
theoretical physicist at the IMS, who led a team that analysed
geographic movements of Indus region settlements over hundreds
of years.
Its like looking at something from a mountain-top
you get a different perspective than from examining archaeological
sites, Adhikari told The Telegraph. The analysis has also
bolstered evidence for the idea that the civilisation did not
abruptly collapse.
The 7000 BC site at Mehrgarh, Baluchistan, provides the earliest
evidence for wheat and barley farming on the Indian subcontinent.
But the new study and earlier archaeological data suggest that
the Indus civilisation may have picked up rice cultivation from
eastern India.
This work provides new evidence to suggest that the Indus
Valley civilisation had influences from the west and from the
east it was not a one-way west-to-east flow, said
Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist with Deccan College, Pune, who
was not associated with the study.
Shinde said archaeological excavations had pointed to rice cultivation
near present-day Gorakhpur in around 7000 BC the same period
as wheat and barley farming in Mehrgarh. Remains of burnt rice
from sites in Haryana and Rajasthan, dated to between 4000 BC
and 3500 BC, and signs of rice cultivation in the Indus Valley
region around 2500 BC suggest an east-to-west flow of rice cultivation,
Shinde said.
The analysis by Adhikari and his colleagues shows a dense distribution
of Indus Valley sites around 2500 BC which marks the beginning
of the mature period of the civilisation lasting about
600 years until about 1900 BC.
The researchers believe it is during this period of high stability
that the civilisations culture matured, leading to its script,
the design of seals, and weights and measures. Adhikari said it
was still unclear what kind of political organisation contributed
to this uniformity in culture.
The study shows a catastrophic reduction in the number
of sites in the Ghaggar-Hakra region around 1900 BC. Over time,
the Indus sites moved upstream, but they were smaller in size
and appear to show a breakdown in large urbanisation. But the
decline around Mehrgarh and Gujarat occurred at a much slower
pace.
Gujarat remained relatively unscathed during the Ghaggar-Hakra
collapse, Adhikari said. Archaeologists say the findings are consistent
with the idea that a slow decline of the Indus urbanisaton eventually
gave way to the growth of settlements along the Gangetic plain.
I think the most significant aspect of this work is its
demonstration of a new way to look at the remote past, Shinde
said.
Several international researchers, including Stanford University
geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, have argued that farming originated
about 10,000 years ago in the region of West Asia known as the
Fertile Crescent and radiated into Europe and Asia.