Signs of Harappan Culture: Contextual Narratives of Excavated Artefacts

Abstract

Harappan culture, also known as Indus Valley Civilization, is an archaeologically significant episode. The period from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE is identified as the ‘Mature’ phase (Possehl, 1996) or ‘Integration' era (Kenoyer, 2020). Peculiar signs on the artefacts of this cultural phase, such as seals, sealings, and tablets, are assumed to bear the ‘script' of the then existing language(s). The assumption of such a ‘script' has been used to designate this period as ‘proto-history' (Possehl, 1990). The ‘script' is composed of a debatable number of signs, and has been given primacy over other attributes of the artefacts. The historiographic study of this scholarship reveals biases because of the prevalent socio-political conditions and archaeological theories over the past century. This bias has resulted in a linguistic hegemony in the archaeological discourse (Gokhale 2022). This existing scholarship has rendered a ‘framework of hypotheses' which includes urbanisation, seal-sealing relationships, migrations, contained sign-lists, and ‘script' decipherment possibilities. These issues are therefore privileged and assumed to be decisive in understanding the archaeological record. The consequence is a latency in the typological studies of these artefacts; which could instead be the basis for a material interpretation epistemology.

This research examines the form and material diversity of approximately five thousand of these artefacts (seals, sealings, and tablets), and the signs on them are treated merely as one of their many attributes. Their posited character as a script of a contemporary language has been kept at the background. The primary aim is to understand how multitude of properties of these artefacts can be documented, analysed, and interpreted given their diverse archaeological contexts. It is critical to see if the signs and non-sign properties demonstrate any discernible relationship with each other in the multi-dimensional space of attributes. Data science techniques are used for this multi-attribute analyses part. For the investigation of the archaeological contexts, GIS is used. The ‘now inaccessible' already excavated layers of the DK-G(S) mound at Mohenjo-daro are digitally reconstructed along with the artefact find-spots. Thus, the virtual geospatial context of the artefacts, along with their inherent attributes, can be analysed to understand the ‘place' of these artefacts in Harappan life. Finally, this research situates new observations within the above mentioned ‘framework of hypotheses'. It examines whether the framework can accommodate new observations or if there is any possibility of other nuanced interpretations.