Surkotada

The site

Excavated by J. P. Joshi in the early 1970s, Surkotada is a compact settlement of about 1.4 hectares, fortified with stone and mud-brick walls and divided into a citadel and a residential annexe, each with its own gateway. Its size and defences suggest an outpost rather than a city.

It shows occupation through the mature and late Harappan phases, with a cemetery containing pot burials and one rock-cut chamber.

The horse bones

Bones recovered at Surkotada were identified by the excavator as horse. In 1993 the Hungarian archaeozoologist Sándor Bökönyi examined them and concluded that some were indeed of true horse rather than the wild ass, or onager, which is native to the region.

The identification has been contested at length, notably by Richard Meadow and Ajita Patel, who argued that the distinguishing features of horse and half-ass teeth and bones are not reliably separable in fragmentary material and that the assignment is not secure.

Why it matters

The dispute is not really about Surkotada. The horse is prominent in the Rigveda and is absent, or nearly so, from securely identified Indus remains and entirely absent from Indus iconography, where bulls, elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers are common.

That absence has been used as evidence that the Vedic culture is later than and distinct from the Indus civilization. Establishing the horse at an Indus site would weaken that argument, which is why a handful of bones from a small site in Kutch has received attention out of all proportion to its size. The identification remains unresolved, and any account that presents it as settled in either direction should be treated with caution.