Introduction

Interaction between settled village farming communities and hunter-gatherers is a well-established sociocultural dynamic in the ethnography of India. An attempt to establish the historical depth of this form of human organization was first made in G. Possehl (1974), later published in Possehl (1980), and expanded upon in Possehl and Kennedy (1979). Evidence was presented there that supports the thought that the settled peoples of the Indus Civilization, especially those at the Harappan town of Lothal (Rao 1979, 1985), were interacting with the hunter-gatherers on the North Gujarat Plain at places like Langhnaj (Sankalia 1965) and other sites in Gujarat and southern Rajasthan (and see Lukacs, this volume).

The Indus Civilization is the earliest phase of urbanization in India and Pakistan. The “Mature” or Urban Phase of the civilization dates to c. 2500–1900 BC (Figure 4.1). This civilization is probably best known from the excavations at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, located in the riverine environments of the Indus and its Punjabi tributaries. The Harappan is the largest of the archaic urban systems, covering just over 1 million square kilometers. There are 1,056 Mature Harappan sites that have been reported, of which 96 have been excavated (Possehl 1999: Appendix A). Harappan sites stretch from Sutkagen-dor on the Iran-Pakistan border, to Manda in Jammu and Kashmir and all through the state of Gujarat.

The Urban Phase of the Harappan cultural tradition came to an end at about 1900 BC, with the abandonment of Mohenjo-daro and many other sites in Sindh.