At a Kutch Harappan graveyard, team works to unlock a mystery: Life and times of those buried

At a Kutch Harappan graveyard, team works to unlock a mystery: Life and times of those buried

Subject :History

Section: Art and Culture

Context: The burial site, spread over 16 hectares in a Kutch village, is considered to be the largest pre-urban Harappan cemetery.

Research findings:

• The Harappan civilisation, one of the oldest in the world, is said to have thrived along the Banks of river Indus from around 5,000 BC to 1,000 BC.
• While the 2,500-year-long period from 5,000BC to 2,600BC is known as the ‘pre-urban’ Harappan phase, between 2,600 BC and 1,900 BC is the ‘urban’ Harappan phase.
• From there on, the civilization declines and 1,900 BC to 1,000 BC is considered the ‘post-urban’ Harappan period.
• The fragment of a shell bangle collected from the Khatiya cemetery and tested at Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, was found to be dating back to 2,850 BC.
• The pottery found as burial goods at the Khatiya site, mainly redware, buffware and grayware, is comparable to the pre-urban Harappan pottery of Sindh and Balochistan and North Gujarat.
• The soil in Khatiya is acidic, facilitating faster decomposition of bodies. Therefore, researchers are findingit hard to extract DNA from samples excavated from this site.”
• Dholavira, the UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the biggest metropolises of the Harappan civilisation, is also in Kutch. It is 150 kilometres Away from Khatiya that’s among the western-most of the Harappan sites in India.
• Given the distance, researchers say, it’s unlikely that people in the pre urban settlements of Dholavira were buried at the Khatiya site.
• “Desalpar and Khirsara, KotdaBhadli and Nadapa are the other well-known Harappan sites in western Kutch. But each of them is a site of urban and post-urban periods of the Harappan civilization and more than 50 km away from Khatiya.
• Being a pre-urban Harappan cemetery, there is a possibility that either there was a Big settlement in Khatiya or there were smaller settlements around Khatiya and the cemetery was a Common burial ground for them,”
• Khatiya is located on the banks of the Gandi, a stream that drains into the Great Rann of Kutch (GRK). Today, the GRK is an expanse of Saline mud flats, but archaeologists believe it used to be navigable in
• Pre historic times and that the Ghaggar-Harka-Nara river used to flow through it. Later, the river dried up, turning Kutch into an arid region.