IELTS CAM Inspired 13 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 13 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 8
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
THE COCONUT PALM
Part
Notes
Uses
trunk
reaches nearly 28 metres tall
gives building timber and, in place of scarce hardwoods, the material for making
1
leaves
up to about 6 metres long
their stiff central ribs are made into brooms
flowers
clustered at the crown of the tree
the stalks yield a sap taken fresh, or boiled down into
2
fruit - outer skin
keeps out water
-
fruit - middle layer (coir)
the coconut's own fibre
chiefly made into
3
fruit - shell (inner layer)
bears three 'eyes'
carved into
4
;
its halves are used as
5
coconut water
a sweetish liquid
drunk as a beverage;
also yields
6
that help surrounding vegetation flourish
coconut flesh
dried to make copra
oil and milk for cooking and for making
7
;
its glycerine is used to prepare
8
Question 9 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
9
A coconut that has drifted at sea for too long can no longer germinate.
10
The palm was already growing on the Atlantic coast of the Americas before the sixteenth-century voyages.
11
Merchants from Arabia earned more from the nut than Europe's sailing crews did.
12
Wild relatives of the coconut grow widely across Asia.
13
In the Americas, plants closely related to the coconut can be found.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Look at the following ideas and the list of researchers below.
Match each idea with the correct researcher, A-C.
Write the correct letter, A-C.
List of Findings
A
Elena Delgado
B
Karol Nowak
C
Ingrid Sorensen
14
the value of giving a baby one's undivided attention while talking to it
15
a link between the speech a baby takes in and the baby's own efforts to produce sounds
16
the benefit to a child of having its two parents talk in contrasting manners
17
a relationship between the quantity of baby talk a child hears and how much it vocalises itself
Question 18 - 23
Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Research into how parents talk to babies
Researchers based at Ashcombe University relied on , alongside dedicated computer software, to examine the way mothers and fathers spoke to their children over an ordinary day. What emerged was that generally kept their usual way of speaking unchanged when addressing their infants. Under a proposal called the , such parents may adopt a more grown-up style of talk in order to ready their children for the language awaiting them beyond the home. Hearing baby talk from one parent and everyday speech from the other, the researchers argue, widens the of speech types the child can rehearse.
A different study, this one carried out by teams at Brackenridge University and Feltham State University, captured speech and other noise using the special that had been fitted onto each baby. Returning to the children at the age of two, the team discovered that those exposed to plentiful baby talk in their early months had built up a considerably larger than the rest.
Question 24 - 26
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
24
a claim that early experience of language helps a baby to organise information in its mind
25
a comparison of how long babies paid attention to sounds modelled on an adult and on another infant
26
an example of something certain parents do for their baby's benefit before it is born
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Reading Passage 3 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H.
27
various suggested reasons for the collapse of the Harappan society
28
a way in which the research findings could prove useful in the present day
29
a contrast between the Harappans and another society of the same era
30
an account of how the Harappan cities were laid out
31
the realisation that earlier researchers had made mistakes
Question 32 - 36
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Investigating evidence of climate change
Dr Priya Devan and Dr Vera Ashcombe have produced the first firm proof that a shift in climate affected the plains of north-western India in the distant past. After retrieving ancient from old sediment and examining it, they detected changes in the water level of a former in the area. These shifts set in once the summer grew weaker, allowing evaporation to outpace the water flowing in — a sign of a long spell of drought.
Meanwhile, Brandt and Chandran’s team is drawing on archaeological remains to study the burnt found at the sites, in order to learn whether people adjusted their farming to the changing climate. They are also examining objects such as the that were produced locally, so as to uncover links between people living in different parts of the region and to track how these links shifted over time.
Question 37 - 40
Look at the following statements and the list of researchers below.
Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-D.
Write the correct letter, A-D.
List of Findings
A
Vera Ashcombe
B
Halvard Brandt
C
Anaya Chandran
D
Priya Devan
37
It is crucial to collect further data about how the region’s environment has altered.
38
Studying the way earlier peoples behaved could bring lasting practical rewards.
39
An approximate figure has been put on how long the dry period lasted.
40
For a long time there was little evidence to explain why the society declined.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The coconut palm
Across thousands of years, communities throughout Asia and the Pacific have built much of daily life around the coconut. To Europeans, by contrast, the nut long stayed a strange, sometimes scarce curiosity. The Portuguese merchant Goncalo Freire, travelling the coasts of southern Asia in the closing years of the 1200s, is said to have come upon the fruit, and a reference to the great Indian nut survives in the journals of the wandering friar Bernard of Auxerre some fifty years later. Today a beach lined with palms has become marketing shorthand, used to sell everything from package tours and confectionery to soft drinks and even the promise of love.
Most of us picture the coconut as a brown, cannonball-like object whose cracked shell yields sweet white kernel, but that is only a fragment of the fruit, and nothing of the tree that bears it. Rising as high as twenty-eight metres, the palm's trunk is slim, grey and smooth. Besides supplying timber for the walls and frames of houses, it is turned to more and more, in place of dwindling hardwoods, when musical instruments are built. Crowning the trunk is a spreading rosette of fronds, each stretching to some six metres; once the soft green tissue is stripped away, the tough central rib of every frond serves in many regions as the makings of a broom. Among these leaves at the crown sit the palm's young flowers, whose stalks, when tapped, release a sap drunk as it comes or simmered down until it thickens into a syrup that cooks use.
In a single year a palm may set as many as sixty fruits, each heavier than a kilogram. Three layers make up the wall of the fruit: an outer skin that keeps water out, a fibrous zone beneath it, and a hard casing at the core. The thick fibrous zone gives us coir, the coconut's own fibre, prized above all in the production of matting. Wrapped around the seed is the woody inner casing, or shell, marked by its three familiar eyes. Out of this shell craftsmen fashion buttons, and, split into halves, the pieces are pressed into use as cups across much of Asia.
Within the shell sits the endosperm, the store of nourishment on which the growing seed depends. At first it is a faintly sweet fluid, coconut water, which people drink with pleasure and which also carries the enzymes that spur neighbouring plants to grow faster and crop more heavily. As the fruit ripens, the liquid firms into the dazzling white, oil-laden flesh we eat. Dried, this flesh is copra, from which coconut oil and coconut milk are pressed; both travel into the world's kitchens and, beyond cooking, into the making of soap. Glycerine, drawn from the fruit's fat, came to matter in a separate field when the physician Anton Keller took it as the base for the soothing ointments he prepared.
Almost everything about the coconut's biology seems to fit it for crossing oceans and settling fresh coasts, a rare talent among plants. Buoyant and salt-tolerant, the big, energy-packed fruits drift for long stretches, though not for ever: researchers reckon that after something like four months adrift they forfeit the power to sprout. Thrown up onto a bare shore, with little but sand around them and the tropical sun blazing down unshaded, the seeds still take root and shoot. What shields the embryo is the pocket of air that forms within the seed as the endosperm sets, while the same fibrous husk that had kept the fruit afloat holds a reserve of moisture on which the young seedling's roots can draw.
Where the coconut first came from is a question scholars have quarrelled over for centuries. Along the western coast of Africa, in the Caribbean and on the Atlantic shore of the Americas, the palm was unknown until the sea voyages of the navigators Duarte Vaz and Cristobal Leon around the turn of the sixteenth century. Trade routes and movements of people that century point to Arab merchants and European crews as those who most likely carried the nut out of southern and south-eastern Asia into Africa, and on over the Atlantic to the eastern seaboard of the Americas. Far harder to explain are the palms that sixteenth-century sailors met on the Pacific side of the Americas, a riddle that has kept scholars talking ever since. Two opposed accounts have been put forward, that the trees reached the region from Asia, or that they had belonged to the Americas all along, and neither escapes difficulty. Asia holds a great range of coconut variety, along with signs that people have drawn on the palm for thousands of years, yet nowhere on that continent does a wild relative grow. With the Americas it is the reverse: close kin of the coconut are present, but nothing shows the palm itself to be native. Boxed in by this deadlock, some have floated the tantalising notion that the coconut began on the coral atolls of the Pacific and spread outward from there.
A. Why do adults slide so readily into that sing-song, stretched-out, endlessly repeated way of speaking whenever a baby is near? Linguists find the habit fascinating, and want to know what this manner of talking does for a child's learning. Since hearing is among the first senses to form — much of it in place before birth — some hopeful, expectant parents will hold recordings of classical music against the pregnant belly. There is even evidence that, a good twelve weeks before it is born, a baby is already attending to the adult voices nearby and quietly gathering the raw materials of the particular language its family happens to speak.
B
B.
Encountering language early seems to benefit the developing brain: babies brought up with two languages in the house, for instance, often prove better at sorting and ranking information in their minds. So what does the charming, sometimes faintly ridiculous sound of speech directed at infants actually do for them, and how much of a difference does it make? Several recent investigations have set out to uncover the science beneath it, and a number of the most striking are gathered here.
C
As it happens, fathers turn to baby talk much less than mothers, and use it differently — and that, a new study finds, is perfectly fine. Karol Nowak and colleagues at Ashcombe University fitted parents with small microphones and voice-recognition software, then followed how each spoke to their child through an ordinary day. 'Mothers did just what decades of earlier work had described,' Nowak says. 'It was the fathers who surprised us: talking to their children, they barely altered the pitch or underlying frequency of their voices.' The reason, he suspects, lies in an idea first put forward in 1979 — the gateway hypothesis — according to which a father's more grown-up speech offers the child a way into the talk they will meet in the wider world. 'The child rehearses one kind of speech with the mother and a different kind with the father,' Nowak explains, 'and so comes away with a broader range of speech styles to practise.'
D
A separate project, run jointly at Brackenridge University and Feltham State University, collected many thousands of half-minute exchanges between parents and infants, dressing thirty-one babies in recording jackets that picked up speech and sound across a normal eight-hour day. The trend was unmistakable: the more baby talk parents produced, the more their infants babbled. Seen again at the age of two, the children who had been steeped in baby talk showed a markedly larger vocabulary, whatever the family's economic standing. 'Those surrounded by baby talk were saying more than the ones who had mainly heard ordinary adult speech,' notes Elena Delgado of Feltham State University. 'And it matters enormously whether the baby talk is one-to-one,' she adds. 'The more a parent uses it with the child alone, the more the child babbles — and the more it babbles, the more words it later produces.'
E
Another study suggests parents might usefully put babies together, so they can babble among their own kind. Researchers at Rideau University and the Montreal Institute of Human Development observed that infants would sooner listen to one another than to adults — perhaps why baby talk turns up among parents everywhere. Using a synthesiser, they generated repeated vowel sounds modelled either on an adult woman's voice or on another baby's, so that only the sound itself could explain any difference, and then measured how long each held an infant's attention. The baby-like sounds kept it about thirty-five percent longer, and drew more from the listeners besides — a flicker of a smile, or lips starting to move as if forming a sound. This pull toward other babies' voices, the team proposes, may be what first sets speech-learning going. 'It might be some quality of the sound that grabs them,' says co-author Mireille Chabert, 'or they may be drawn to it because they are just starting to notice their own power to make sounds, and sense it as something they too could do.'
F
The last of a series of studies conducted by Ingrid Sorensen and her research team, published in the journal Frontiers in Developmental Neuroscience, took forty-eight babies from two closely spaced age bands — eight-month-olds and eleven-month-olds — and played them syllables, some from their native German and some from Korean, a language none had met. Each lay inside a brain-imaging scanner focused on the region that governs the muscle movements of speech. Sorensen and her colleagues found that hearing baby talk sets the infant brain practising the work of language: the motor areas fired, a sign that even now the brain is trying to answer back and puzzle out how to speak. More telling still, while the eight-month-olds responded alike to every syllable whatever its language, the older babies' brains toiled harder over the motor patterns of the unfamiliar Korean than the familiar German. With that, Sorensen's team may have glimpsed the very process by which babies learn to separate their mother tongue from every other.
New research sheds light on the disappearance of an ancient society
A
A. Five thousand years ago, the Harappan Civilisation of what is now Pakistan and north-western India stood at its height; a thousand years after that, its cities lay deserted. This was a sophisticated Bronze Age society, one that raised sprawling ‘megacities’ and carried luxury craftwork in trade across great distances — and yet its people left behind almost no pictures of themselves. That silence is all the more striking set beside ancient Egypt, where rulers and commoners alike were carved and painted across temple walls at much the same date. The missing self-portraiture, though, is only one thread of a far larger puzzle.
B
‘We can trace the rise of the Harappans in a good deal of archaeological detail, but their decline is a different matter — the evidence for it is surprisingly thin,’ says Dr Halvard Brandt, an archaeologist at Ravensholt University. Numerous explanations have been floated over the years. Some researchers propose that great glacier-fed rivers altered their courses, throwing water supply and farming into disarray; others that swelling populations outgrew what the land could yield, or that the trade networks on which the cities leaned simply unravelled, or that warfare and invasion brought them low; still others point to a change in climate that upset the supply of food and water. ‘A single cause is unlikely,’ Brandt cautions. ‘The trouble is that, until recently, we have had very little hard evidence for any of these ideas. Much of the debate has amounted to well-argued guesswork.’
C
Some of the firmest new ground has come from simply working out where the settlements actually stood. A team led jointly by Brandt and Dr Anaya Chandran, of the Kaveri Institute of Archaeology, discovered early on that a great many known sites did not sit where the records placed them. Mapping how the wider landscape had been occupied in relation to water sources, they found the published positions of ancient settlements off by anything from a few hundred metres to tens of kilometres. Any analysis built on the existing figures, they realised, would rest on shaky foundations. Several seasons of fresh survey work followed, during which the team pinpointed more than 170 settlements that no one had previously recorded.
D
The sheer scale of what was lost is easiest to grasp from the cities themselves. As their populations climbed, the Harappans put up great public baths, craft workshops, palaces and assembly halls, each set out in its own distinct quarter. Dwellings were grouped into blocks along broad main avenues and narrow side lanes, and many came fitted with their own wells and drainage. Then, a little after 2000 BC, this order began to fray: streets were left uncleaned, buildings fell empty, and the structures used for ritual passed out of service. Once the collapse was complete, a full thousand years would slip by before cities on anything like that scale rose again anywhere in South Asia.
E
The first solid proof that climate played a part has now emerged from the plains of the north-west, where hundreds of Harappan sites once stood. Dr Priya Devan and Dr Vera Ashcombe, both of Ravensholt University’s earth sciences department, extracted ancient pollen from the layered sediment of a former marsh and turned to geochemical analysis to reconstruct the region’s climate history. ‘The main thing feeding that marsh would have been the summer monsoon,’ Devan explains. ‘What we see is an abrupt shift about 4,200 years ago, when the water lost to evaporation began to exceed the amount coming in — the classic signature of a drought.’ Ashcombe adds: ‘Our calculations suggest the summer monsoon stayed weak for something like 250 years before it recovered to roughly the pattern we still know today.’
F
It has long been supposed that other great Bronze Age societies faltered at much the same moment, with a single climate event on a global scale often held to blame. Whether or not these local stories connect, what really grips archaeologists is how such large events played out across differing landscapes and differing communities. ‘The Harappan world was vast, and its weather far from uniform,’ Chandran points out. ‘Gathering fuller data on how the environment shifted — especially near the two great cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and across the Indian Punjab — is now of the first importance.’
G
Brandt and Chandran’s team is now piecing together how people actually lived in the region five thousand years ago. They are analysing charred seeds from the sites, asking whether crops were being raised under severe water stress and whether farmers reshuffled the mix of plants they grew as the weather turned. They are also studying the beads the Harappans made, along with other elements of their material culture, to judge whether such things were particular to single districts or shared across much wider areas — and so to reconstruct the networks that once linked the population, and to see how those networks changed.
H
For Brandt, archaeologists are unusually well placed to study how earlier societies met environmental and climatic upheaval. ‘By looking closely at how people in the past responded to pressures and threats of this kind, we can draw lessons that speak to the present,’ he says. ‘That gives us something to offer the public, and the government and administrative bodies too, so that they act more wisely on questions such as managing water supplies, balancing urban growth against the countryside, and safeguarding cultural heritage for those who come after us.’
Across thousands of years, communities throughout Asia and the Pacific have built much of daily life around the coconut. To Europeans, by contrast, the nut long stayed a strange, sometimes scarce curiosity. The Portuguese merchant Goncalo Freire, travelling the coasts of southern Asia in the closing years of the 1200s, is said to have come upon the fruit, and a reference to the great Indian nut survives in the journals of the wandering friar Bernard of Auxerre some fifty years later. Today a beach lined with palms has become marketing shorthand, used to sell everything from package tours and confectionery to soft drinks and even the promise of love.
Most of us picture the coconut as a brown, cannonball-like object whose cracked shell yields sweet white kernel, but that is only a fragment of the fruit, and nothing of the tree that bears it. Rising as high as twenty-eight metres, the palm's trunk is slim, grey and smooth. Besides supplying timber for the walls and frames of houses, it is turned to more and more, in place of dwindling hardwoods, when musical instruments are built. Crowning the trunk is a spreading rosette of fronds, each stretching to some six metres; once the soft green tissue is stripped away, the tough central rib of every frond serves in many regions as the makings of a broom. Among these leaves at the crown sit the palm's young flowers, whose stalks, when tapped, release a sap drunk as it comes or simmered down until it thickens into a syrup that cooks use.
In a single year a palm may set as many as sixty fruits, each heavier than a kilogram. Three layers make up the wall of the fruit: an outer skin that keeps water out, a fibrous zone beneath it, and a hard casing at the core. The thick fibrous zone gives us coir, the coconut's own fibre, prized above all in the production of matting. Wrapped around the seed is the woody inner casing, or shell, marked by its three familiar eyes. Out of this shell craftsmen fashion buttons, and, split into halves, the pieces are pressed into use as cups across much of Asia.
Within the shell sits the endosperm, the store of nourishment on which the growing seed depends. At first it is a faintly sweet fluid, coconut water, which people drink with pleasure and which also carries the enzymes that spur neighbouring plants to grow faster and crop more heavily. As the fruit ripens, the liquid firms into the dazzling white, oil-laden flesh we eat. Dried, this flesh is copra, from which coconut oil and coconut milk are pressed; both travel into the world's kitchens and, beyond cooking, into the making of soap. Glycerine, drawn from the fruit's fat, came to matter in a separate field when the physician Anton Keller took it as the base for the soothing ointments he prepared.
Almost everything about the coconut's biology seems to fit it for crossing oceans and settling fresh coasts, a rare talent among plants. Buoyant and salt-tolerant, the big, energy-packed fruits drift for long stretches, though not for ever: researchers reckon that after something like four months adrift they forfeit the power to sprout. Thrown up onto a bare shore, with little but sand around them and the tropical sun blazing down unshaded, the seeds still take root and shoot. What shields the embryo is the pocket of air that forms within the seed as the endosperm sets, while the same fibrous husk that had kept the fruit afloat holds a reserve of moisture on which the young seedling's roots can draw.
Where the coconut first came from is a question scholars have quarrelled over for centuries. Along the western coast of Africa, in the Caribbean and on the Atlantic shore of the Americas, the palm was unknown until the sea voyages of the navigators Duarte Vaz and Cristobal Leon around the turn of the sixteenth century. Trade routes and movements of people that century point to Arab merchants and European crews as those who most likely carried the nut out of southern and south-eastern Asia into Africa, and on over the Atlantic to the eastern seaboard of the Americas. Far harder to explain are the palms that sixteenth-century sailors met on the Pacific side of the Americas, a riddle that has kept scholars talking ever since. Two opposed accounts have been put forward, that the trees reached the region from Asia, or that they had belonged to the Americas all along, and neither escapes difficulty. Asia holds a great range of coconut variety, along with signs that people have drawn on the palm for thousands of years, yet nowhere on that continent does a wild relative grow. With the Americas it is the reverse: close kin of the coconut are present, but nothing shows the palm itself to be native. Boxed in by this deadlock, some have floated the tantalising notion that the coconut began on the coral atolls of the Pacific and spread outward from there.
Encountering language early seems to benefit the developing brain: babies brought up with two languages in the house, for instance, often prove better at sorting and ranking information in their minds. So what does the charming, sometimes faintly ridiculous sound of speech directed at infants actually do for them, and how much of a difference does it make? Several recent investigations have set out to uncover the science beneath it, and a number of the most striking are gathered here.
C. As it happens, fathers turn to baby talk much less than mothers, and use it differently — and that, a new study finds, is perfectly fine. Karol Nowak and colleagues at Ashcombe University fitted parents with small microphones and voice-recognition software, then followed how each spoke to their child through an ordinary day. 'Mothers did just what decades of earlier work had described,' Nowak says. 'It was the fathers who surprised us: talking to their children, they barely altered the pitch or underlying frequency of their voices.' The reason, he suspects, lies in an idea first put forward in 1979 — the gateway hypothesis — according to which a father's more grown-up speech offers the child a way into the talk they will meet in the wider world. 'The child rehearses one kind of speech with the mother and a different kind with the father,' Nowak explains, 'and so comes away with a broader range of speech styles to practise.'
D. A separate project, run jointly at Brackenridge University and Feltham State University, collected many thousands of half-minute exchanges between parents and infants, dressing thirty-one babies in recording jackets that picked up speech and sound across a normal eight-hour day. The trend was unmistakable: the more baby talk parents produced, the more their infants babbled. Seen again at the age of two, the children who had been steeped in baby talk showed a markedly larger vocabulary, whatever the family's economic standing. 'Those surrounded by baby talk were saying more than the ones who had mainly heard ordinary adult speech,' notes Elena Delgado of Feltham State University. 'And it matters enormously whether the baby talk is one-to-one,' she adds. 'The more a parent uses it with the child alone, the more the child babbles — and the more it babbles, the more words it later produces.'
E. Another study suggests parents might usefully put babies together, so they can babble among their own kind. Researchers at Rideau University and the Montreal Institute of Human Development observed that infants would sooner listen to one another than to adults — perhaps why baby talk turns up among parents everywhere. Using a synthesiser, they generated repeated vowel sounds modelled either on an adult woman's voice or on another baby's, so that only the sound itself could explain any difference, and then measured how long each held an infant's attention. The baby-like sounds kept it about thirty-five percent longer, and drew more from the listeners besides — a flicker of a smile, or lips starting to move as if forming a sound. This pull toward other babies' voices, the team proposes, may be what first sets speech-learning going. 'It might be some quality of the sound that grabs them,' says co-author Mireille Chabert, 'or they may be drawn to it because they are just starting to notice their own power to make sounds, and sense it as something they too could do.'
F. The last of a series of studies conducted by Ingrid Sorensen and her research team, published in the journal Frontiers in Developmental Neuroscience, took forty-eight babies from two closely spaced age bands — eight-month-olds and eleven-month-olds — and played them syllables, some from their native German and some from Korean, a language none had met. Each lay inside a brain-imaging scanner focused on the region that governs the muscle movements of speech. Sorensen and her colleagues found that hearing baby talk sets the infant brain practising the work of language: the motor areas fired, a sign that even now the brain is trying to answer back and puzzle out how to speak. More telling still, while the eight-month-olds responded alike to every syllable whatever its language, the older babies' brains toiled harder over the motor patterns of the unfamiliar Korean than the familiar German. With that, Sorensen's team may have glimpsed the very process by which babies learn to separate their mother tongue from every other.
B. ‘We can trace the rise of the Harappans in a good deal of archaeological detail, but their decline is a different matter — the evidence for it is surprisingly thin,’ says Dr Halvard Brandt, an archaeologist at Ravensholt University. Numerous explanations have been floated over the years. Some researchers propose that great glacier-fed rivers altered their courses, throwing water supply and farming into disarray; others that swelling populations outgrew what the land could yield, or that the trade networks on which the cities leaned simply unravelled, or that warfare and invasion brought them low; still others point to a change in climate that upset the supply of food and water. ‘A single cause is unlikely,’ Brandt cautions. ‘The trouble is that, until recently, we have had very little hard evidence for any of these ideas. Much of the debate has amounted to well-argued guesswork.’
C. Some of the firmest new ground has come from simply working out where the settlements actually stood. A team led jointly by Brandt and Dr Anaya Chandran, of the Kaveri Institute of Archaeology, discovered early on that a great many known sites did not sit where the records placed them. Mapping how the wider landscape had been occupied in relation to water sources, they found the published positions of ancient settlements off by anything from a few hundred metres to tens of kilometres. Any analysis built on the existing figures, they realised, would rest on shaky foundations. Several seasons of fresh survey work followed, during which the team pinpointed more than 170 settlements that no one had previously recorded.
D. The sheer scale of what was lost is easiest to grasp from the cities themselves. As their populations climbed, the Harappans put up great public baths, craft workshops, palaces and assembly halls, each set out in its own distinct quarter. Dwellings were grouped into blocks along broad main avenues and narrow side lanes, and many came fitted with their own wells and drainage. Then, a little after 2000 BC, this order began to fray: streets were left uncleaned, buildings fell empty, and the structures used for ritual passed out of service. Once the collapse was complete, a full thousand years would slip by before cities on anything like that scale rose again anywhere in South Asia.
E. The first solid proof that climate played a part has now emerged from the plains of the north-west, where hundreds of Harappan sites once stood. Dr Priya Devan and Dr Vera Ashcombe, both of Ravensholt University’s earth sciences department, extracted ancient pollen from the layered sediment of a former marsh and turned to geochemical analysis to reconstruct the region’s climate history. ‘The main thing feeding that marsh would have been the summer monsoon,’ Devan explains. ‘What we see is an abrupt shift about 4,200 years ago, when the water lost to evaporation began to exceed the amount coming in — the classic signature of a drought.’ Ashcombe adds: ‘Our calculations suggest the summer monsoon stayed weak for something like 250 years before it recovered to roughly the pattern we still know today.’
F. It has long been supposed that other great Bronze Age societies faltered at much the same moment, with a single climate event on a global scale often held to blame. Whether or not these local stories connect, what really grips archaeologists is how such large events played out across differing landscapes and differing communities. ‘The Harappan world was vast, and its weather far from uniform,’ Chandran points out. ‘Gathering fuller data on how the environment shifted — especially near the two great cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and across the Indian Punjab — is now of the first importance.’
G. Brandt and Chandran’s team is now piecing together how people actually lived in the region five thousand years ago. They are analysing charred seeds from the sites, asking whether crops were being raised under severe water stress and whether farmers reshuffled the mix of plants they grew as the weather turned. They are also studying the beads the Harappans made, along with other elements of their material culture, to judge whether such things were particular to single districts or shared across much wider areas — and so to reconstruct the networks that once linked the population, and to see how those networks changed.
H. For Brandt, archaeologists are unusually well placed to study how earlier societies met environmental and climatic upheaval. ‘By looking closely at how people in the past responded to pressures and threats of this kind, we can draw lessons that speak to the present,’ he says. ‘That gives us something to offer the public, and the government and administrative bodies too, so that they act more wisely on questions such as managing water supplies, balancing urban growth against the countryside, and safeguarding cultural heritage for those who come after us.’
