Indian Protohistory: The Indus Civilization — Village Expansion, Metal, Art and Writing, City Planning and the Theories of Decline at Amri, Kot Diji, Kalibangan, Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Lothal, Dholavira and Rakhigarhi — the Pottery Traditions from OCP and Black-and-Red Ware to PGW and NBP, the Copper and Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Second Urban Revolution, and the Megaliths

The Indus or Harappan civilization was announced to the world by John Marshall, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey, in September 1924, after Daya Ram Sahni's excavations at Harappa on the Ravi (1921) and R.D. Banerji's at Mohenjodaro on the Indus (1922) had revealed the same seals, script and bricks at sites 600 km apart; Alexander Cunningham had published a Harappan seal in 1875 without knowing its age. It is now known from more than a thousand sites across well over a million square kilometres — from Sutkagen Dor on the Makran coast to Alamgirpur in western Uttar Pradesh, and from Manda in Jammu to Daimabad in Maharashtra — the largest of the Bronze Age civilizations. Its roots lie in the village farming of Baluchistan that began at Mehrgarh (excavated by Jean-François Jarrige, 1974–86) about 7000 BCE with barley, wheat, cattle, sheep and goat. Its development is described in three stages, following Gregory Possehl and Mark Kenoyer: an Early Harappan or Regionalisation era (about 3200–2600 BCE), in which regional cultures — Amri in Sindh, Kot Diji, Hakra, Sothi–Siswal in the Ghaggar plain — spread villages across the plains, some with walls, and shared more and more pottery styles, motifs and the beginnings of signs; a Mature Harappan or Integration era (about 2600–1900 BCE) of cities, uniform weights, seals and script, and standardised crafts across the whole area; and a Late Harappan or Localisation era (about 1900–1300 BCE), in which the cities shrank and regional cultures re-emerged — Cemetery H in the Punjab, Jhukar in Sindh, the Rangpur and late Sorath phases of Gujarat — as settlement shifted east into Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh and south into Gujarat. The "expansion of village sites" the syllabus asks about is therefore a double process: the multiplication of Early Harappan villages that made the cities possible, and the Late Harappan scatter of many small villages to the east and south that followed them. Villages always outnumbered cities: most Harappans were farmers and herders living in settlements of a few hectares, supplying the five great cities — Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Ganweriwala, Rakhigarhi and Dholavira — with grain and cattle.

The Harappans worked copper, bronze (copper alloyed with tin, or with arsenic), gold, silver and lead; copper came from the Aravallis, where the Ganeshwar–Jodhpura culture near the Khetri mines supplied arrowheads, fish-hooks and axes, and tin probably from Afghanistan or Central Asia. Tools — flat axes, chisels, knives, razors, fish-hooks, saws — were cast in open or closed moulds and hammered, and figures were cast by the lost-wax (cire perdue) method, of which the "Dancing Girl" of Mohenjodaro is the masterpiece. Their crafts were standardised across the civilization: long carnelian beads drilled with hard stone drills at Chanhudaro and Lothal, etched carnelian, faience, shell bangles from the Gujarat coast, steatite seals, cubical chert weights in a binary-then-decimal series (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, then 160, 320, 640), and linear measures (the Lothal ivory scale, the Mohenjodaro shell scale). The art is small and superb: the steatite "Priest-King" bust with a trefoil-patterned shawl, the Dancing Girl, the red-sandstone male torso from Harappa, terracotta figurines of women (read as mother goddesses), animals and carts, and the seals, which show the "unicorn" most often, the bull, elephant, tiger and rhinoceros, and scenes such as the seated horned figure that Marshall called "proto-Śiva" or Paśupati. The script, on some 4,000–5,000 inscribed objects, has about 400 signs (Iravatham Mahadevan's concordance of 1977 listed 417), is written mostly from right to left in short texts averaging five signs, and remains undeciphered; no bilingual has been found. Harappan architecture and planning are the civilization's signature. Cities were laid out on a cardinal orientation with a raised, walled "citadel" on the west and a larger lower town on the east (Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Kalibangan), or in three parts (Dholavira); streets ran in a broadly grid pattern; houses of burnt brick, in the standard ratio of thickness, width and length of 1 : 2 : 4, were built round courtyards and had bathing floors and drains that emptied into covered street drains with inspection holes; there were wells in the houses and streets, public buildings such as the Great Bath (about 12 by 7 metres, waterproofed with bitumen), the great hall or "granary", pillared halls and, at Dholavira, reservoirs cut into the rock. The decline began about 1900 BCE, as the cities were abandoned or shrank over two or three centuries while village life continued; the theories are several. Wheeler's Aryan invasion ("Indra stands accused", 1947), resting on the "massacre" skeletons of Mohenjodaro, was refuted by George Dales ("The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjo-daro", 1964), who showed the skeletons were from different levels and not victims of one attack; flooding of the lower Indus by tectonic damming was argued by Robert Raikes and Dales; the drying or shifting of the Ghaggar–Hakra and the capture of its tributaries by the Indus and Yamuna, by Lambrick and others; ecological degradation from deforestation for brick kilns, by Fairservis; the collapse of the trade with Mesopotamia (Meluhha of the cuneiform texts); and climatic change — the weakening of the monsoon around the 4.2-thousand-year event, argued from lake and marine cores by Liviu Giosan and others (2012). Most archaeologists now see no single cause, but a transformation — Possehl's "Localisation" — in which a changing climate and river system made the integrated system of cities unsustainable while its people and many of its traditions continued.

After the Harappan cities, the protohistory of the Ganga–Yamuna doab and its neighbours is organised by four pottery traditions, each recognised by fabric, firing and decoration and each marking a cultural phase. Ochre Coloured Pottery (OCP) was first recognised by B.B. Lal in 1950–51 at Bisauli (Badaun district) and Rajpur Parsu (Bijnor district), and in the lowest level (Period I) at Hastinapur: a thick, poorly fired, wheel-made red pottery with an ochre wash that rubs off on the fingers, looking water-logged, sometimes with black painted bands and incised patterns. It is found in the upper doab, western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and north-eastern Rajasthan (Atranjikhera, Lal Qila, Saipai, Jodhpura, Sinauli), dated broadly to about 2000–1500 BCE, overlapping the late Harappan, and associated with copper tools; at Saipai it was found with a Copper Hoard harpoon, and at Sinauli with burials, copper antenna-hilted swords and wheeled carts. Black-and-Red Ware (BRW), black inside and on the rim and red outside, was produced by inverted firing, the vessel placed mouth-down so that the covered surface was starved of oxygen; it is a technique rather than a single culture and has the widest range in time and space: in Harappan Gujarat (Lothal, Rangpur), in the white-painted ware of the Ahar–Banas culture, in the Chalcolithic of the middle Ganga (Chirand, Pandu Rajar Dhibi), below the PGW at Atranjikhera, and as the dominant pottery of the south Indian megaliths into the early centuries CE. Painted Grey Ware (PGW), a fine, thin, wheel-made grey pottery painted in black (and sometimes red) with lines, dots, circles, sigmas and swastikas, mostly shallow dishes and bowls, was first found at Ahichchhatra (1940–44) and defined by Lal at Hastinapur (Period II), and belongs to the upper Ganga–Yamuna doab, the Ghaggar valley and the eastern Punjab (Hastinapur, Ahichchhatra, Atranjikhera, Bhagwanpura, Jakhera, Kurukshetra), dated about 1200–600 BCE; its settlements are villages with wattle-and-daub houses, rice, wheat and barley, cattle and horse, and, from its middle phase, iron tools, and it is often associated, on geographical and chronological grounds, with the later Vedic culture. Northern Black Polished Ware (NBP or NBPW), a deluxe wheel-made pottery of very fine clay with a lustrous, glossy black (sometimes steel-blue, golden or silvery) surface, dated about 700–200 BCE, is the ware of the Mahajanapadas and the Maurya empire, the second urbanisation and the Buddha's world; its core is the middle Ganga (Kaushambi, Rajghat at Varanasi, Sravasti, Vaishali, Pataliputra, Rajgir), and it spread as a luxury ware to Taxila, Ujjain, Sisupalgarh, Chandraketugarh and Amaravati.

In India the Bronze or Copper Age is not a single culture but the long period, from about the fourth to the late second millennium BCE, when copper and bronze were added to stone. Its general characteristics are the smelting and casting of copper, alloyed in the Harappan cities with tin or arsenic; the continued use of stone blades and microliths beside the metal (hence "Chalcolithic", copper-stone); village farming with regional painted pottery; craft specialisation; and, in the Indus region, the first urbanisation. Its distribution runs from the Harappan zone — India's Bronze Age civilization proper — to the Chalcolithic cultures of Rajasthan, Malwa and the Deccan (the previous chapter), the Ganeshwar–Jodhpura culture by the Khetri copper mines of Rajasthan, which supplied the Harappans with copper arrowheads, fish-hooks and axes, the Chalcolithic of the middle Ganga and Bengal (Chirand, Senuwar, Pandu Rajar Dhibi), and the Copper Hoards of the Ganga–Yamuna doab and Chotanagpur — caches of flat and shouldered celts, harpoons, antenna-hilted swords, rings and the enigmatic "anthropomorphs", associated with OCP at Saipai. Its people were farmers growing wheat, barley, rice, millets and pulses and keeping cattle, sheep and goat; pastoralists; metalworkers, potters and bead-makers; and, in the Harappan cities, merchants and an elite whose nature is still debated. The Iron Age begins in India in the late second millennium BCE: iron objects occur at Ahar and in the PGW levels of Atranjikhera and elsewhere in the doab by about 1200–1000 BCE, in the southern Neolithic–Megalithic transition at Hallur by about 1000 BCE, and in the megaliths of Vidarbha (Naikund, with an iron-smelting furnace; Mahurjhari, Junapani); earlier dates, back to the early second millennium BCE, have been claimed for sites in the middle Ganga plain such as Malhar and Raja Nala-ka-Tila, and are debated. Its characteristics are iron tools and weapons (axes, sickles, hoes, arrowheads, spearheads, daggers), the expansion of cultivation, the horse, and — in the north — the growth of chiefdoms into kingdoms. The "urban revolution" is Gordon Childe's term (1950) for the rise of cities, which he defined by ten criteria: large, dense settlements; full-time craft specialists; a surplus paid to a god or king; monumental public buildings; a ruling class; writing; exact and predictive sciences such as arithmetic and the calendar; sophisticated naturalistic art; long-distance trade; and a state organised on residence rather than kinship. The Harappans were India's first urban revolution; the second urbanisation came in the middle Ganga plain from about 600 BCE with the sixteen Mahajanapadas, fortified cities of mud rampart and moat (Kaushambi, Rajgir, Ujjain, Sravasti), punch-marked silver coins, NBP ware, ring-wells and soakage pits, writing in the Brahmi script by the Maurya period, and the Buddha and Mahavira. How much the iron axe and ploughshare contributed to clearing and cultivating the Ganga plain, and so to this second urbanisation, is debated between those who stress it (D.D. Kosambi, R.S. Sharma) and those who stress rice agriculture, trade and political change.

A megalith (Greek megas, "great", and lithos, "stone") is a monument built of large stones, usually a burial or a memorial to the dead. In India the megaliths are concentrated in the peninsula — Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra — with others in central India, the Kashmir valley (the menhirs at Burzahom), and the north-east. The south Indian megaliths belong mostly to the Iron Age, from about 1200 BCE (some a few centuries earlier) to the early centuries CE, and share a cultural package: iron tools and weapons (swords, daggers, arrowheads, spearheads, axes, sickles, tridents), horse furniture (bits, bridles), Black-and-Red Ware and other pottery, beads of carnelian and etched carnelian, and bronze and gold ornaments; burials are often secondary (the bones collected after exposure and placed in the tomb) and multiple, and the tombs were reopened for later burials. Many are grave monuments and many memorials without bones; some are aligned with the sunrise, and alignments of standing stones such as those at Mudumal in Telangana have been studied for astronomical orientation. The syllabus asks for six types. A menhir (Breton men hir, "long stone") is a single upright stone set up as a memorial, sometimes over a burial, sometimes in rows or alignments. A dolmen (Breton, "stone table") is a chamber of upright slabs (orthostats) roofed by a large capstone, standing on the surface — common in Kerala (the Marayur dolmens) and at Hire Benakal in Karnataka. The topikal (the syllabus's "topical"; Malayalam, "hat stone") is a Kerala type in which a dome-shaped, dressed laterite capstone is set directly over a burial pit or urn like a hat; the related kudakkal ("umbrella stone") raises a similar mushroom-shaped cap on four inclined slabs. A cist is a box-like chamber of four stone slabs with a floor slab and a capstone, sunk in a pit, often with a "port-hole" cut in one slab — the port-hole cists of Brahmagiri and Maski — and usually surrounded by a stone circle. A cairn circle is a burial pit, holding an urn, a sarcophagus or bones, covered by a heap of stones (the cairn) and ringed by a circle of boulders — the most widespread type, and the classic form in Vidarbha (Junapani, Mahurjhari), where horse bones and horse ornaments have been found in the graves. Sarcophagi are coffins of baked clay, trough-shaped and often legged, sometimes with a lid, placed in pits or cists — the legged terracotta sarcophagi of Pallavaram and Sankavaram in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and those in the Kerala rock-cut caves. Urn burials without stones, as at Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu (excavated by Alexander Rea in 1899–1905) with its iron, bronze and gold diadems, and the laterite rock-cut chambers of Kerala, belong to the same megalithic culture. Megalithic traditions are still living among the Khasi, the Naga, the Munda and Ho (the flat sasan diri over graves), the Gond and others, which lets the archaeological anthropologist study the meaning of stones — commemoration of ancestors, feasts of merit, clan claims to land — in the present.