| |
 Excavating
at the ancient town of Gilund in southern Rajasthan, India, one of the largest
sites of the little-known Ahar-Banas culture, archaeologists led by teams
from the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Deccan College, Pune, India
have discovered a bin filled with more than 100 seal impressions (many
shown here on the left) dating to 2100-1700 B.C. The existence of
the seals, and their particular styles, offer surprising new evidence for
the apparent complexity of this non-literate, late and post-Indus Civilization-era
culture, according to Dr. Gregory Possehl, UPM curator and excavation co-director.
Dr. Possehl, collaborator Dr. Vasant Shinde of Deccan College, Pune, India,
and their teams made-up of professionals and students from around the world,
have conducted excavations at Gilund over four seasons, beginning in 1999.
The team is working to understand the social life, history and agricultural
developments of these peoples, separated by about 200 miles of largely mountainous
and desert-like regions from the powerful Indus Civilization that had its
heyday 2500-1900 B.C. They came upon the bin with its seal impressions in
the 2002-2003 season completed in February.
 The bin
was in a large building that has not yet been completely excavated but is
known to be larger than 25 x 60 feet, composed of parallel walls of well-made
sun-dried brick. The size and nature of the building suggests that it was
a "public" structure, with walls ranging in width from about 30
to 49 inches, and spaces between them about the same width. The presence
of the bin within the space between two of the walls, and other signs of
occupation, including pits and living debris, indicate that the long, narrow
"rooms" were used for storage. While the exact nature of the commodities
stored in the warehouse is not known, agricultural or animal products, possibly
valuable processed items like ghee, oil and textiles, seem likely, according
to Dr. Possehl.
Clay, nature's soft and plentiful sealant, has been used by people for millennia
to keep containers closed. Seals, on the other hand, frequently decorated
with symbols to indicate a person or persons and used to make seal impressions
that lay claim or suggest special rights to a container's contents, suggest
a more stratified society. While no actual seals were discovered at Gilund,
the unexpected collection of so many seal impressions strongly points to
the presence of a populate of elite citizens who used stamps as identification
of themselves and their elevated status--and who marked commodities that
were stored in this building under their control. A large oval shaped bin
about 5 feet deep and 2.5 feet in diameter at its midpoint, to keep the
seal impressions in--and potentially keep others from duplicating specific
impressions for their own use--further indicates the elitist nature of this
warehouse.
 The
impression designs (example shown at left, a), according to Dr. Possehl,
offer additional evidence for a more worldly-wise culture than was formerly
assumed to exist at Gilund. The impressions found in the bin were made from
seals both round and rectilinear. The design motifs are generally quite
simple, with wide-ranging parallels from Indus Civilization sites such as
Chanhu-daro, Pirak, Kot Diji and Nindowari, 400 to 500 miles away. There
are also distinct parallels with seals from another cultural group archaeologists
call the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), from as far away
as Central Asia and northern Afghanistan, 1,000 miles to the northwest (examples
of actual BMAC seals are shown at left, b).
"Gilund is providing us with good evidence for a stratified society
that had wide-ranging contacts between the peoples of western India, Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Central Asia just at the end of the third millennium and
the beginning of the second millennium," noted Dr. Possehl. "Archaeologists
have known for a number of years that the so-called BMAC peoples were in
Sindh and Baluchistan, as well as Iran, and even as far south as the Arabian
Gulf. This, however, is the first time that such evidence has come from
so deep within India, significantly expanding the geographic picture of
a critical period of regional change, when the once-powerful Indus Civilization
is undergoing a process of transformation."
That transformation, Dr. Possehl notes, eventually led to the abandonment
of the great Indus cities, the simplification of the Indus people's socio-cultural
system, the loss of much of their technological virtuosity, and an end to
their system of writing and measurements. "Learning more about how
cultures like the Ahar-Banas and BMAC interacted with the Indus Civilization
may help to broaden our understanding of the rise, and fall, of great civilizations
of the world," said Dr. Possehl.
Excavations at Gilund will resume next winter, when the archaeologists will
explore the wall or walls discovered last season around the site to determine
if the town was fortified. They will also further explore the large public
building where the impressions were found, seeking further evidence of the
building's function.
Funding for the Gilund Project was made possible by grants from the National
Science Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, private donors,
and Deccan College, Pune, India.
Dr. Gregory Possehl (below, left) is Curator-in-Charge of UPM's Asian
Section. Information on Dr. Possehl's principal publications and excavations
at Rojdi may be found by visiting his homepage.
Dr. Possehl's collaborator, Dr. Vasant Shinde, of Deccan College, Pune,
India, is shown here (below right photo, on the left) with University of
Pennsylvania graduate student Praveena Gullapalli.
|
|
ADDITIONAL
PHOTOS
(click on a photo for a larger
view and caption; best viewed using Internet Explorer)
|
