This is an artist’s reconstruction of the gateway and drain at the city of Harappa. Image credit: Chris Sloan.
Harappan civilization,
or the Indus Valley civilization, developed in the middle of the third
millennium BC, at the same time as contemporaneous civilizations in
Egypt and Mesopotamia. It stretched over a million square kilometers of
what is now Pakistan and India.
The city of Harappa and the city of
Mohenjo-Daro – the greatest achievements of this culture – are well known for their impressive, organized layout.
Recent excavations have demonstrated that the cities grew rapidly from 2200-1900 BC, when they were largely abandoned.
“The
collapse of the Indus Civilization and the reorganization of its human
population has been controversial for a long time,” said Dr Robbins
Schug of Appalachian State University, who is the lead author of the
study appearing in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
Climate,
economic, and social changes all played a role in the process of
urbanization and collapse, but little was known about how these changes
affected the human population.
Dr Schug and her colleagues
examined evidence for trauma and infectious disease in the human
skeletal remains from three burial areas at the city of
Harappa.
Their findings counter longstanding claims that the Harappan
civilization developed as a peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian
state-level society, without social differentiation, hierarchy, or
differences in access to basic resources.
This is an artist’s reconstruction of Mohenjo-Daro. Image credit: University of Minnesota.
The
results suggest instead that some communities at Harappa faced more
significant impacts than others from climate and socio-economic strains,
particularly the socially disadvantaged or marginalized communities who
are most vulnerable to violence and disease. This pattern is expected
in strongly socially differentiated, hierarchical but weakly controlled
societies facing resource stress.
The study adds to the growing body of research about the character of Harappan society and the nature of its collapse.
“Early
research had proposed that ecological factors were the cause of the
demise, but there wasn’t much paleo-environmental evidence to confirm
those theories. In the past few decades, there have been refinements to
the available techniques for reconstructing paleo-environments and
burgeoning interest in this field,” Dr Schug said.
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