(1) Research objectives and Backgraound

The Indus civilization thrived in the northwest of South Asia from 2600 BC and declined around 1900 BC. The decline here means the shift of the distribution of Indus sites and the disappearance of urban sites. This project aims to reconstruct the interrelation between the human societies and the natural environment of the Indus civilization and clarify the causes of its decline through a multidisciplinary approach.

     Investigation into human-environment interaction is the key to understand environmental problems. This applies not only to those of modern societies, but to those of every civilization since the beginning of the human history. As regards the decline of the Indus civilization, some scholars consider that it was caused by local factors such as the invasion of Aryans or a great flood, while others consider that global climate change affected the whole Indus regions and triggered its decline. These hypotheses, however, have not been examined properly.

     Recently past environmental problems have had attracted interests from scholars all over the world. Jared Diamond’s book titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, for example, examines the causes of collapse of past civilizations and tries to enhance awareness on the problems of modern civilizations. This project attempts to discover environmental problems surrounding the Indus civilization. We will reconstruct the palaeo-environment in the region through geological survey, DNA analysis, carbon dating, botanical survey, etc., and find out what kind of environmental change took place at that time. For this purpose our research teams investigate ancient climate change, avulsion of the Ghaggar River, the palaeo-coastline of Gujarat and palaeo-seismic activities in the Himalayas in the Mature Harappan period.

     As regards socio-cultural aspects of the civilization, we conduct research using both archaeological and ethnological/linguistic approaches. We aim to reconstruct the social and agricultural systems of the period by analyzing various artefacts and plant and animal remains obtained directly through archaeological excavations. We also conduct field research to examine current agricultural systems in South Asia and relevant vocabulary in contemporary languages, at least part of which seem to have been inherited from the Mature Harappan period.

     Other teams from different countries have attempted to organize research projects focusing on the issue of the impact of climate change on the Indus civilization, but none of them has succeeded so far due to political reasons. It is significant that for the first time in the history we could successfully combine research efforts from both India and Pakistan in our project.

 

(2) Contribution to global environmental issues

It is important to study the long-term (over the last few thousand years’) impact of climate change in South Asia which is both geographically and culturally diverse. Data obtained from our project teams will help us understand the mechanism of desertification and the impact of climate change on the contemporary civilization. In this respect, the reconstruction of the history of human-environment interaction in this region will contribute to the solution of current environmental problems.

     The Ecohistory program of RIHN deals with the environmental histories of the two regions, i.e. the Green Belt and the Yellow Belt. It has had projects focusing on East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and West Asia. South Asia, our project’s focus area, is a transitional region from the Green Belt to the Yellow Belt, and it thus occupies a very important position within the program itself. The reconstruction of the ecohistory of South Asia, which we’d like to achieve, will thus make an important contribution to the reconstruction of the ecohistory of the whole area covered by the program.

The focus of our project this year was the activities of PERG which was not fully operating in the previous year. Their major task was to assess the impact of environmental change (such as climate change, avulsion, and sea-level change) on the decline of the Indus civilization.

As regards climate change, they conducted core sampling at the Rara Lake in Nepal to examine climate change during the Mature Harappan period. They succeeded to obtain five core samples. They checked one of those and confirmed that the date of the oldest layer was around BP 7,500. The analysis of these samples will reveal whether or not the climate change of 4.2ka (which caused the decrease of winter rain in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia) affected the Indus regions, and if so, to what extent. We will wait for the outcome of their analysis which is due next fiscal year.

    Apart from coring, they are trying to reconstruct the sea temperatures of the Indian Ocean through coral sampling. They will examine sea surface temperatures and monsoon patterns during the Mature Harappan period, since it is known that Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) phenomena are closely related to monsoon patterns in South Asia.

As regards avulsion, PERG had already concluded, on the basis of their field research in the previous year, that the Ghaggar River, which was described as a large river in the Rig-Veda text, was a rather small river highly affected by monsoon rains. Their findings reject the previous hypothesis that the decline of the Indus civilization was due to the drying up of the large Ghaggar-Hakra River on which the Indus agriculture was dependent. This year they will investigate whether or not a stream capture occurred at the source of the Ghaggar River in the Himalayas.

    As regard sea-level change, they estimated in the previous year that the sea-level in the Mature Harappan period had been about two metres higher than the present level. They conducted field research to collect data to test this hypothesis in March this year.

    MCRG has successfully concluded excavations at Farmana and Kanmer. They are now engaged in the analysis of the excavated artefacts in preparation for the publication of final reports. They did not conduct any excavation this year, but they conducted field research to collect detailed geographical information on various Indus sites (including both old and newly discovered ones) using GPS. They visited sites in Haryana and Rajasthan. SSRG is carrying out pollen and phytolith analysis on data obtained from the excavations, while ICRG continues its philological and linguistic research. They are steadily accumulating data on the Indus society and culture, which will be integrated into GIS.

 

    The most substantial achievement this year was the success of coring by PERG. PERG members, especially those from Kochi University, used the equipments brought from Japan by ship and then by a helicopter and successfully obtained sediment core samples from the Rara Lake in Nepal (3,000 metres above sea-level). The obtained core samples arrived in Japan by ship last December. We expect that the outcome of the analysis of those samples will set an international standard on research in climate change in South Asia. They plan to present their findings in a special session on climate change and ancient civilizations at the conference of the American Geophysical Union, which will be held at Santa Fe in USA in March 2011.

    Through archaeo-botanical research of our project it has become increasingly clear that the Indus regions could be divided according to the types of cultivated plants they depend on — winter crops and summer crops — and the impact of climate change differed substantially form region to region. We also started to form a new team specializing in DNA analysis on the human and animal bones found in Farmana in the previous year and the fossilized otoliths found in Gujarat this year. We plan to present the outcome of these researches in academic conferences, and subsequently publish academic papers on them. We are sure that they will reveal some of the causes of the decline of the Indus civilization.

    This year we conducted two international conferences, one in Japan and the other in India, to propagate the outcome of our research to scholars all over the world. The first one was the 13th meeting of Harvard Roundtable titled Ethnogenesis of South and General Asia (ESCA). This was organized jointly with Sato project at RIHN in May 2009. The second one was Bhuj Roundtable organized jointly with the ASI of Gujarat State Government and Rajasthan Vidyapith University in Bhuj, India, in January 2010.

     We regularly publish occasional papers to present the outcome of our project. Three new volumes were published this year. They contain papers that present some of the research outcome of MCRG, such as reports on the excavation at Farmana. We also reedited and published the previous outcome of our project in two volumes through a major Indian publishing company. We consider that it is significant that scholars specializing in the Indus civilization all over the world can now have an access to the outcome of our project through these publications. In addition, the Language Atlas of South Asia, which will be the basis for the integration of all the data obtained in our project into GIS, will be completed and published by the end of this year.

 

A new research group specializing in DNA analysis on human and animal (esp. bovine) bones was formed this year. This is because a large amount of human and animal bones were excavated in Farmana last year.

This June we invited Nilofer Shaikh, VC of Shah Abdul Latif University, Pakistan, and exchanged an MOU with the university. We had planned to start a full-scale excavation in cooperation, but to our regret, our plan did not materialize this year due to the political instability in Pakistan.

    As regards Indus sites in India, we plan to conduct surveys in cooperation with M.D. University in Haryana, Rajasthan University in Rajasthan and M.S. University in Gujarat next year. We have already exchanged an MOU with each of them.

As regard the budget, we distributed a large portion of it to PERG, as the focus of our project this year is on the palaeo-environmental surveys conducted by them.

 

    Our project has published nine volumes of Occasional papers so far. They present the outcome of our research in English. We consider that it is important to publish them through a large publisher so that they are easily accessible to those interested in the issue including scholars all over the world. As before, Manohar Publishers, a major publishing company in India, published two volumes for our project this year: Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past in South Asia, and Indus Civilization: Text and Context. We also made a contract with them to launch a new RIHN Indus Project Series — the first three volumes of the series would be the reedited versions of Volumes 1-3 of Current Studies of the Indus Civilization. No other RIHN projects have published so many English books, and we consider that this is a significant achievement.

    We also would like to emphasize the significance of the success of core sampling at the Rara Lake in Nepal, as mentioned above. No research team in the world has so far succeeded in obtaining core samples which cover such a long duration of time (7,500 years). We await the outcome of the analysis.

In May we organized a meeting of Harvard Roundtable with Sato Project at RIHN, inviting scholars from all over the world. There were lively discussions on various issues on the Indus civilization. The papers presented in the meeting will soon be published from Harvard University.

Next year is the fourth year of the full-research stage of our project. Large-scale field research was completed this year, and each research group will direct their efforts to the analysis of the obtained data and the synthesis of the outcome of such analysis. Side by side with this, we will try to gradually integrate the research outcome of each group into GIS and along a temporal axis. We will use a large portion of our budget for the analysis and synthesis of the research outcome and its publications.

MCRG are analyzing the huge data obtained from excavations at Kanmer and Farmana for publication. They plan to complete writing up a final report on the excavation of each site by the end of September 2010. They are also collecting supplementary data on other Indus sites in India and Pakistan. We expect that we will obtain a detailed picture of network between different regions of the Indus civilization including big cities.

PERG will place the first priority on the analysis of the core samples obtained from the Rara Lake. In addition, they will analyze the geological data obtained from field study in Ghaggar and Gujarat regions, followed by the analysis of fossilized otoliths obtained from Gujarat and coral samples from the Maldives. We expect that detailed data on climate change in South Asia will be obtained by the end of next year. The newly formed DNA research group, on the other hand, will continue their analysis of human and bovine bones obtained from Farmana.

SSRG will continue its research on the distribution of cultivated plants, while ICRG will continue reconstructing languages and cultures in ancient South Asia, through field study and philological research. The outcome of their research, together with the research outcome of the other groups, will be integrated to GIS.

To sum up, our efforts are now directed towards spatial and temporal synthesis of the findings of the individual research groups in order to develop a robust description of the interchange of environmental change and cultural systems during the Mature Harappan period.