INDIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

Harappans and their Contemporary Cultures
 

Speaker: Dr. V.N. Prabhakar, archaeologist and presently Visiting Faculty at the Archaeological Sciences Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar

 

The Harappan Civilization is one among the four Bronze Age Civilizations of third millennium BCE that flourished for nearly 700 years in the river valleys of Indus-Ghagger-Hakra in modern India and Pakistan. The Harappans in order to cater to their economic prospects interacted with different cultures all around the Greater Indus Valley, the Kashmir Neolithic complex,  the Kulli and Helmand cultures on the west and northwest and reached as far as Central Asian region and also with Mesopotamia. Thus, the Harappans were enterprising in establishing cultural contacts with several contemporary ones, for various purposes of trade, extraction of raw materials of various kinds for catering to both domestic and external needs. This lecture will focus on some of these contemporary cultures of Harappans, with the aid of illustrative slides supported by distribution maps