Indus craft and beadwork

Beads

The most technically demanding Indus craft was bead-making. Carnelian was heated to deepen its colour, flaked, ground and then drilled — the long barrel beads, some over ten centimetres, requiring a drill of a specially hardened stone and, by experimental estimate, days of continuous work for a single piece.

Steatite was used for minute disc beads produced in enormous numbers, some under a millimetre across. Faience, a glazed artificial paste, was manufactured in a range of forms. Etched carnelian beads, patterned by applying an alkali before firing, are a distinctive Indus product and are found in Mesopotamian graves, which makes them among the clearest markers of the trade.

Shell and metal

Shell working, using the large marine species available on the Gujarat and Makran coasts, produced bangles, ladles, inlays and the graduated scale from Mohenjo-daro, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan). Bangle production was substantial and specialised, with workshops identified at coastal sites.

Copper and bronze were used for tools, vessels, mirrors, ornaments and the small number of cast figurines. Analysis indicates ores from Rajasthan and elsewhere, and both alloying with tin and arsenical copper are attested.

Organisation

Workshops have been identified at Chanhudaro, Lothal and elsewhere, with material at every stage of production, which indicates specialised craftspeople rather than household manufacture. The distribution of raw materials — carnelian from Gujarat, steatite from Rajasthan and Balochistan, shell from the coast, lapis from Afghanistan — implies organised procurement over long distances.

This is the clearest evidence for economic integration across the Indus zone, and, given the absence of palaces, it is also the main basis for arguments that merchants rather than kings were the organising force.