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Sheikh Javed Sindhi, who was engaged in research at the site, said that previously, 4,348 copper coins were excavated by R.D. Banerji, Sir John Marshall, and Mackay from 1922 to 1931. These coins belonged to the Kushan Period dating back to the 2 to 5 Century AD, he said...Rustam Bhutto, in-charge of the soil and water testing laboratory, said the treatment process for separating the amalgamated coins would take at least a month to make the figures and language on coins visible.Ali Haidar Gadhi, senior conservationist at said that Mr Banerji discovered nearly 2,000 coins, 338 of which were of...

Scientists have unveiled a sprawling burial site in India belonging to one of the world's earliest urban civilisations. The BBC's Soutik Biswas delves into the clues the graves might give us about how the early Indians lived and died.In 2019, as scientists embarked on excavating a mound of sandy soil near a remote village in the sparsely populated Kutch region, situated not far from Pakistan in India's western state of Gujarat, they had no inkling of the surprise that lay in store for them. "When we began digging, we thought it was an ancient settlement. Within a week, we realised...

Previously, the Iron Age burial site of Adichanallur in southern Tamil Nadu had revealed an impressive collection of iron implements, currently housed in Chennai’s Egmore Museum, dated between 1000 BCE and 600 BCE.Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, while addressing the Tamil Nadu Assembly Monday, said: “It has been found that the date of the iron artefacts ranges from 2172 BCE to 1615 BCE. The results have reiterated the fact that the Iron Age of Tamil Nadu dates back 4,200 years, which is the oldest in India.”This finding has answered questions relating to the start of agricultural activity in Tamil Nadu, he...

The south east coast of Tamil Nadu was inhabited in pre-historic times mainly by Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids and Australoids rather than people similar to contemporary Tamils, a dental anthropological study has found. A team of anthropologists came to the finding after studying more than 1,000 teeth from Adichanallur's pre-historic harbour site on the south-east coast of Tamil Nadu that dates back to 2,500 BC... Optical microscope techniques were employed to study the teeth, which have shown the various growth stages, ageing and wearing processes, racial and ethnic and geographical affinities, dietary patterns, jaw mechanism, constitutional abnormalities of the jaws, pathological...

Researchers are getting a glimpse into ancient Indus Valley food choices by analyzing residues on ceramic pots from urban and rural settlements during the Mature Harappan period (c.2600/2500–1900 BC). It is a landmark study because this is the first multi-site analysis of fats and oils on pottery from the Indus Valley civilization. The results enable us to see and compare the popularity of some of the ancient Indus Valley foods across settlements and over time. The researchers analyzed lipid residues on the pottery to find out what plant or animal products, such as fatty acids, remained and could provide them...

Carbon dating suggests that the cultural deposits may be 300 years older than believed... The results from the fourth excavations suggest that the “second urbanisation [the first being Indus] of Vaigai plains happened in Tamil Nadu around 6th century BCE as it happened in Gangetic plains.” ... The recent scientific dates obtained for Keeladi findings push back the date of Tamil-Brahmi script to another century, i.e., 6th century BCE... Six carbon samples collected from the fourth season (2018) of excavations at Keeladi were sent to Beta Analytic Lab, Miami, Florida, U.S., for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) dating... “This finding suggests...

Hasanlu developed into a significant commercial and production center during the early Iron Age (1400-800 B.C.), owing to its location on important trade and communication routes between Mesopotamia and Anatolia. The citadel at the center of the settlement contained an array of monumental buildings, including palaces, temples, and large multi-columned halls. The evidence Danti is studying confirms that the citadel met with a violent end. Many buildings were ransacked and burned, which caused them to collapse. In addition, the remains of more than 250 people were uncovered, some with signs of systematic execution. "The horrific level of violence evident in...

Archaeologists from the Deccan College Deemed University in Pune have discovered two skeletons, a young male and a female, buried at the same time in the same grave with the man's face turned toward the woman. It is the first anthropologically confirmed joint burial of a couple in a Harappan cemetery. The 'couple's grave' was found in the Harappan settlements excavated at Rakhigarhi in Harayana, some 150km northwest of Delhi. Archaeologists said evidence points at the couple being buried simultaneously or about the same time. They could not find clear evidence if one was buried after the other. Although many...

A group of nine Indus Valley copper plates (c. 2600–2000 BC), discovered from private collections in Pakistan, appear to be of an important type not previously described. The plates are significantly larger and more robust than those comprising the corpus of known copper plates or tablets, and most significantly differ in being inscribed with mirrored characters. One of the plates bears 34 characters, which is the longest known single Indus script inscription. Examination of the plates with x-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrophotometry indicates metal compositions, including arsenical copper, consistent with Indus Valley technology. Microscopy of the metal surface and internal structure...

A 5,000-year-old industrial production center featuring furnaces, hearths, and mud-brick structures has been found in northwest India between two channels of the Ghaggar River. According to a report in Frontline, the settlement, occupied for more than 1,000 years, lacked the fortification walls, streets at right angles, citadel, and area for traders and craftsmen usually seen in Harappan sites. One of the furnaces, used for smelting gold and copper, had a platform where the smith could sit and blow through an underground tube to the fire pit. Nearby hearths were used to produce gold jewelry and copper fish hooks and spear...

Did the Indian subcontinent start spinning without Chinese know-how? New findings suggest that silk making was not an exclusively Chinese technological innovation, but instead arose independently on the Indian subcontinent. Ornaments from the Indus valley in east Pakistan, where the Harappan culture flourished more than 4,000 years ago, seem to contain silk spun by silk moths native to the region. What's more, the silk seems to have been processed in a way previously thought to have been a closely guarded secret within China. There is hard and fast evidence for silk production in China back to around 2570 BC; the...

Indian archaeologists uncovered a 4,000-year-old copper crown in the village of Chandayan, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh this week, from what they believe was the late Indus Valley civilization. According to Dr. Rakesh Tewari, the director general of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), this is only the second crown discovered at an Indus Valley site in either India or Pakistan. Earlier, a silver crown was found at another late Indus Valley site in what is now the Fatehabad district of Haryana state in northeast India... The copper crown, decorated with a Carnelian and a Fiance bead...

During the third millennium BCE, the Indus Civilisation flourished in what is now northwest India and Pakistan. Between 2200-1900 BCE the culture was characterised by long-distance exchange networks, carefully planned urban settlements such as Harappa and Mohenjo Daro that had sophisticated sanitation facilities, standardised weights and measures, and a sphere of influence that extended over a million square kilometres of territory. The culture was seemingly at its height when the end came (collapse attributed to climatic change) but recent research published in both the open access journal PLoS ONE and an earlier 2012 article in the International Journal of Palaeopathology...

Researchers examined the chemical composition of teeth from a Harappan cemetery used from roughly 2550 to 2030 B.C. The analysis showed that the city was a cosmopolitan melting pot. Many of the deceased had grown up outside Harappa... Many of the outsiders, surprisingly, are men buried near women native to Harappa. The findings are preliminary, but they suggest men moved in with their brides, even though in South Asia women traditionally move to their husband's homes... Bones from about 1900 to 1700 B.C. -- more than a millennium later than those examined by Kenoyer -- make it clear that at...

The recent International Conference on Harappan Archaeology produced an unexpected announcement from archaeologists BR Mani and KN Dikshit, both of the Archaeological Survey of India, who claim that new dates from excavations show the Harappan culture began around 2000 years earlier than previously thought.The ruins of the Harrapan city of Mohenjo-daro remained undocumented for over 3,700 years, until their discovery in 1922 by Rakhaldas Bandyopadhyay, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India. He was led to the mound by a Buddhist monk, who reportedly believed it to be a stupa. Image: Wikimedia commons Redating of Harappan culture Based on...

A study of human bones from the ruins of Harappa has revealed signs of lethal interpersonal violence and challenged current thinking that the ancient Indus civilisation was an exceptionally peaceful realm for its inhabitants. An American bioarchaeologist has said that her analysis of skeletal remains from Harappa kept at the Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta, suggests that women, children and individuals with visible infectious diseases were at a high risk of facing violence. Gwen Robbins Schug studied the skeletal remains of 160 individuals from cemeteries of Harappa excavated during the 20th century. The burial practices and injuries on these bones...

Panaji, Feb 07: Renowned German Indologist and scientist of religion, Egbert Richter Ushanas today claimed that he has unravelled the mystery of Indus Valley scripts by decoding major seals and tablets found during various archaeological excavations. "Already 1,000-odd seals are decoded and of them, 300-odd are printed in monography -- the message of Indus seals and tablets," stated Richter, who has also decoded tablets from Easter Island in Pacific Ocean and disc of Phaistos on Island of Crete in Meditarrenean Sea. "All the seals are based on Vedas -- Rig Veda and Atharva Veda," Richter told a news agency here....

A civilisation parallel to Harappa? Experts wonder Abhishek Kapoor Vadodara, December 11: Was Gujarat the cradle of an independent civilisation, contemporary of the classical Harappan civilisation around the Indus Valley? This view is gaining academic credence in the community of archaeologists specialising on the subject across the country. The Sorath (present Saurashtra) region civilisation, dating back to 3700 BC at some places, was distinct from the classical Harappan as it developed in the Indus Valley, say researchers in the field. ‘‘It maintained its separate identity in many ways even as a cultural, economic and technological exchange took place between the...

'Lost river' could rewrite history books February 19 2002 at 08:33AM Madras India, - The discovery of an ancient city on the seabed off India's western coast has scientists salivating at the prospect of a fundamental rewrite in the chronology of ancient human society. Preliminary tests have suggested the site in the Gulf of Cambay off Gujarat state could date as far back as 7 500 BC, several thousand years older than what were previously known to be the first significant urban settlements. The discovery was made purely by chance last year as oceanographers from the National Institute of ...