The first excavation
In 2005 villagers at Sanauli, levelling a field, came upon pottery and bones. The Archaeological Survey of India excavated the site in 2005–06 under D. V. Sharma and uncovered a cemetery of 116 burials. They were of several kinds, extended burials, secondary burials of bones gathered after death, and symbolic burials with no remains. With them were pottery of the Ochre Coloured Pottery tradition and of late Harappan affinity, copper objects including antenna-hilted swords, and beads of carnelian and other stones.
The 2018 finds
A second excavation in 2018, led by S. K. Manjul, found burials of an unusual elite type. Several bodies lay in wooden coffins whose lids and sides were decorated with sheets of copper bearing human and animal figures. In three burial pits were wooden vehicles with solid wheels, sheathed in copper with copper triangular ornaments, preserved as impressions and metal fittings. With them were copper swords, daggers, shields, a helmet-like object, and what the excavators identified as torches and combs.
The chariot debate
The excavators described the vehicles as chariots and the burials as those of warriors, and suggested that they reflected a society comparable to that of the Vedic texts. The claim attracted wide attention because the horse-drawn spoked-wheel chariot is central to debates about the arrival of Indo-Aryan speakers in South Asia, usually associated with the steppes.
Other archaeologists questioned the identification. The wheels are solid, not spoked; no horse remains were found with them; and similar vehicles could have been drawn by cattle. Some described them as carts or ceremonial vehicles. The date, around 2000–1800 BCE, places the burials in the late Harappan period, contemporary with the decline of the Indus cities. Whatever their function, they are the earliest wheeled vehicles found in a burial context in South Asia, and the coffin burials have no close parallel elsewhere in the subcontinent.
Significance
Sanauli has changed the picture of the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture of the upper Ganges–Yamuna doab, once known mainly from pottery and copper hoards, by showing an elite with elaborate burial rites and metalwork. Further excavations in the area have continued, and the site has become a reference point in the debate over continuity and change between the Harappan and Vedic periods.
Further reading
- Chakrabarti, Dilip K. The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology. Oxford University Press, 2006
- Bryant, Edwin. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture. Oxford University Press, 2001
- Trautmann, Thomas R. The Aryan Debate. Oxford University Press, 2005
See also
- Ochre Coloured Pottery — Ochre Coloured Pottery is a Chalcolithic ware of the Ganges-Yamuna Doab, dated to roughly the early second millennium BCE, occupying the period between the Indus cities and the Painted Grey Ware settlements.
- Decline of the Indus cities — The Indus cities were progressively abandoned in the early second millennium BCE, in a process now understood as gradual, regional and multi-causal rather than as a single collapse.
- The Aryan question — The Aryan question concerns how Indo-Aryan languages came to be spoken in South Asia, and is the most contested problem in the study of ancient India.
- Indus Valley Civilization — The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), also called the Harappan Civilization, was a Bronze Age urban culture that flourished across the Indus river system and beyond between roughly 2600 and 1900 BCE, one of the world's three earliest urban civilizations alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.