Whatever happened to the Harappan Civilisation?
New research sheds light on the disappearance of an ancient society
A
AFive 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
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
CSome 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
DThe 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
EThe 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
FIt 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
GBrandt 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
HFor 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.’
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Question 1 - 5
Which paragraph contains the following information?
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
1.
various suggested reasons for the collapse of the Harappan society
2.
a way in which the research findings could prove useful in the present day
3.
a contrast between the Harappans and another society of the same era
4.
an account of how the Harappan cities were laid out
5.
the realisation that earlier researchers had made mistakes