Mehrgarh

The sequence

Excavated from 1974 by a French mission under Jean-François Jarrige, Mehrgarh preserves a long occupation on the Kachi plain at the foot of the Bolan Pass. The earliest levels are aceramic Neolithic, with mud-brick houses, storage units and burials, and evidence for the cultivation of barley and wheat and the herding of sheep, goats and cattle.

Later levels show the introduction of pottery, the growth of craft production, and by the fourth millennium a substantial settlement with wheel-made ceramics, copper working and long-distance materials.

Findings

Mehrgarh has produced several notable firsts. Cotton threads preserved on a copper bead push cotton use back to the fifth millennium BCE. Human teeth from the Neolithic levels show drilled holes made with a flint bit, evidence of dentistry some nine thousand years old. Terracotta figurines from the later levels form one of the longest sequences of figurine production anywhere.

The animal remains show a shift from hunted gazelle towards herded cattle, sheep and goat, documenting domestication in progress rather than as an accomplished fact.

Significance

Mehrgarh matters because it demonstrates that farming, herding, pottery and settled village life developed in the north-west of the subcontinent over millennia, without requiring an external origin, and that the Indus cities emerged from a long local sequence.

Whether the specific populations are continuous with the Indus cities is a separate question, and the genetic work bearing on it — including the Rakhigarhi genome, whose Iranian-related farmer ancestry is of a lineage that separated before the spread of West Asian farming — is still developing. The site itself has been damaged by conflict in the region and further excavation has not been possible for many years.