Chanhudaro

Excavation

The site was identified in 1931 and excavated by Ernest Mackay for the American School of Indic and Iranian Studies in 1935-36. It is considerably smaller than Mohenjo-daro, some 130 kilometres to the north, and appears to have been a specialised production centre rather than a major city.

Unusually among excavated Indus settlements, no raised citadel mound has been identified, which is part of the reason it is read as a manufacturing town.

Crafts

The workshops are what make Chanhudaro important. Bead-making is represented in every stage, from raw carnelian and steatite through drilled and partly finished pieces to completed beads, together with the drills and furnaces used. Seal-cutting, shell-working, bone-working and metalworking are all attested.

The evidence for the long barrel carnelian beads, which required extraordinary skill to drill and which travelled as far as Mesopotamia, is particularly full here, and Chanhudaro has been central to reconstructing how Indus craft production was organised.

Later occupation

Above the mature Indus levels the site was reoccupied by the Jhukar culture, distinguished by different pottery and by seals of a different type. The sequence is one of the clearer instances of what followed the urban phase in Sindh, and bears on the argument about whether the civilization's end was collapse, transformation or displacement.