Regional Trajectories from Hunter-Gathering to Farming in

South Asia

The consequences of Mehrgarh

In the Indus Basin, the Southwest Asian agropastoral economy introduced to Mehrgarh by 7000 Bc developed to become the economic foundation for Mature Harappan civilization, via a number of successive Pre-Harappan cultures (Possehl 2002) dating variously to between 5000 and 2600 BC in sites such as Mehrgarh, Kot Diji, Amri, and Harappa (Figure 4.7). By 3500 BC, aspects of these cultural traditions had extended southeast of the Indus, to occur in the basal deposits of sites such as Dholavira and Prabhas Patan in Gujarat, and Kalibangan and Balathal in Rajasthan. As well as villages and towns, camps of hunters and pastoralists also appeared east of the Indus system. Agriculture had certainly entered northwestern Peninsular India, by movement around the southern side of the Thar Desert, many centuries before the opening of the Mature Harappan around 2600 Bc.15

Figure 4.7 The early farming cultures of South Asia. Modified from Misra 2001; Chakrabarti 1999.

Another spread at a similar date seems also to have occurred around the northern peripheries of the Indus basin, to carry the Southwest Asian economy to Neolithic sites such as Burzahom and Gufkral in Kashmir (ca. 3000-2500 Bc),16 and possibly also by this time into the upper Ganges and Yamuna

Valleys. The basal layer in Gufkral reveals a rather recent (ca. 3000 Bc) and puzzling aceramic Neolithic, a situation made more complex by the fact that some cultural items from these two Kashmir sites, especially the cord-marked pottery and ground stone harvesting knives, have apparent Chinese Neolithic affinities. At this stage, however, we have no coherent traces in these sites of rice, or of the African millets.

During the later third millennium BC, continuing contact between the Indus region and Gujarat led to the appearance in the latter region of a number of Mature Harappan settlements, some fortified. Examples include Surkotada, Dholavira (already settled in pre-Harappan times), Rojdi, and Lothal (Figure 4.7). Mature Harappan sites were also founded in the Yamuna Valley, for instance at Alamgirpur near Delhi, and Harappan-influenced settlements were established at Balathal in Rajasthan and Daimabad in Maharashtra. By 1900 BC, the decline of core-region sites such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley system was already under way. Various factors, including movement of the Indus course in Sind, capture of the tributary Sarasvati river system by the Yamuna/Ganga, and possible human over-exploitation of a fragile environment (salinization? too many kiln-fired bricks?), were rapidly leading to large-scale settlement abandonment in the Harappan heartlands along the Indus and its Punjab tributaries (Possehl 1997; Flam 1999). Harappan agricultural populations presumably had to face three overlapping choices - reduce population in situ, shift to pastoralism, or continue as farmers and move out into new territories.

As documented by Greg Possehl, the Late or Post-Urban Harappan (19001400 Bc) was apparently a period of considerable population spread into Gujarat and into the interfluve (doab) between the upper Ganges and Yamuna rivers in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. These spreads occurred with the establishment of small villages rather than urban settlements and lacked typical Mature Harappan traits such as seals, use of script, and cubical stone weights. In both Gujarat and the GangesYamuna doab, these Late Harappan eastward pulses doubtless amalgamated with the earlier spreads of Pre-Harappan and Harappan populations, indeed they may merely have been later stages of the same long-term movement. But by now the economies were enriched by the addition of the African millets and rice.'' The result by 1800 Bc was a considerably body of population with access to a full range of winter and

summer crops, domesticated cattle and caprovines, painted pottery and copper metallurgy, expanding to north and south around an ever-desiccating Thar Desert, toward the Ganges Basin and Peninsular India.

The big question at this point is whether the earliest farming cultures which eventually spread into western India and the Ganges Basin were derived exclusively from the Pre-Harappan and Harappan complexes, or whether they incorporated other, perhaps local, ancestries. This question cannot be answered easily, but the latter situation seems likely, as we will see.