Discovering and interpreting the Harappans

Discovery. Alexander Cunningham, the first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, was shown a Harappan seal, but did not realise how old it was: he was looking for the Early Historic period described by Chinese pilgrims. Later, Daya Ram Sahni (at Harappa) and R. D. Banerji (at Mohenjodaro) found more seals. In 1924, John Marshall announced the discovery of a new civilisation in the Indus valley.

Methods. Marshall dug in uniform horizontal units, ignoring the stratigraphy (the layers) of the site, so objects from different periods were mixed up. R. E. M. Wheeler (from 1944) followed the layers, which gave a truer picture.

Changing stories. Wheeler blamed the end of the civilisation on an Aryan 'invasion', pointing to skeletons found at Mohenjodaro. In the 1960s, George Dales showed that those skeletons came from different periods, so there was no single massacre. More recently, DNA from Rakhigarhi (in Haryana, the biggest Harappan city) shows a continuity of population. Evidence can overturn an old story.

Religion is the hardest to interpret. Early archaeologists called some terracotta female figurines 'mother goddesses', a seal showing a seated figure a 'proto-Shiva', and some conical stones lingas. But these readings remain speculative: we cannot read the script to confirm them.