ACCORDING to a renowned archaeologist, Dr Bridget Allchin, the Indus Valley is a ‘green band’ that follows foothills of the steeply folded mountains of Balochistan, dividing them from the undulating sandy uplands of the Thar region.
Dr Allchin has written in his notebook that the green band lies in the centre of Sindh and a remarkable irrigation system gives the land such an air of permanence that one often tends to forget one is in a desert.
In upper Sindh, there’s a hill range known as the Rohri Hills. It is often referred to as a dissected ‘limestone’ plateau. The range covers an area of 40kms from north to south and 16kms from east to west. At present, the Indus River flows in the east-west direction through the Bakkar gorge near the northern end and turns southward, almost parallel to the long axis of the plateau.
Apart from its closeness to the river, the Rohri Hills Range, by and large, looks like a desert landscape. The hills are of uniform height, 40 to 50 metre above the plain, with steeply sloping sides. Many hills are capped by a layer of chart nodules.
These days limestone is used for different construction purposes. In days of yore, it was also used for making a number of implements. For example, different kinds of blades have been found from Harappa that were made from the same stone.
In their archaeological quest, Dr Allchin’s team marked out quadrates around some of the more clearly-defined areas and separately recorded all the artefacts within each quadrate. The blades that the team found were of high quality and had no signs of cracks or flaws that one may find on artefacts of historical importance. All of them looked fresh, their edges were sharp and there was very little sign of sandblasting, except for very slight ‘patination’. It is worth noticing that the surface of some of these artefacts was moderately patinated. Also, it was found that the production of these blade cores was done on a larger scale.
A complete survey to ascertain the full extent of the Harappan factory area would require several weeks, more than what Dr Allchin’s team could spend a few decades ago. What kept the team going was the fact that almost everything that was found on the hilltops by the team showed some evidence of human work and while walking on the hills one could not avoid treading on artefacts and factory debris. It soon became clear that the Harappans had cleared the upper layer of darkly patinated flint at some places in order to reach more lightly patinated nodules below, probably because they had been protected from being weather-weary and therefore had fewer flaws. In doing so, they had piled up the unwanted nodules of chert (a siliceous rock of cryptocrystalline silica occurring as bands in sedimentary rock) or simply thrown them down the hillside. Much of this rejected material consisted of factory debris and tools of earlier periods, particularly of the Middle Palaeolithic age. The artefacts were all fairly and heavily sandblasted so that the sharp edges were blunted and generally had patina of dark brown colour, but not as dark or heavy as the surfaces of the original flint nodules. In this respect they are in marked contrast with the Harappan factory debris. The Middle Palaeolithic cores and flakes of many different kinds were heaped up with other debris or put on the sides and at the foothills where Harappans used to work. When pieces of chert were made into artefacts, the actual body of the chert was found to be of a different colour from the ones used by the Harappans.
In addition to the Harappan and Middle Palaeolithic working floors, the team of archaeologists found some objects which appeared to have been used entirely to make parallel-sided blades of the upper Palaeolithic type from the same dark patinated chert as the Middle Palaeolithic artefacts. These were different from Harappan blades, being thicker and less regular in outline and having much larger bulbs of percussion, indicating a different technique of striking the core, probably by a direct blow with a stone hammer. Limestone of the Rohri Hills, particularly of more accessible hills, was being quarried for road metal and other purposes. The first step in this process was to gather all chert into small heaps, a process which effectively destroyed the evidence of working floors but was distinct from the Harappan method of removing and banking up the upper layer of chert to expose the lower.
In the vicinity of the mediaeval city of Arore, the archaeological team noticed shallow rock shelters beneath the overhanging cliffs on some of the limestone hills. Some appeared to contain middle and upper Palaeolithic artefacts and occupation debris mixed with limestone, but all those were so small and the cliff appeared to be crumbling so rapidly that the value of the deposits seemed doubtful. This is another aspect of the hills that deserves detailed investigation as larger shelters might well be found which would provide a cultural sequence and material for marking the dates that would help to clarify early archaeology of the region.
The most clearly differentiated Palaeolithic site in the Rohri hills is on the southern end, near a village called Chancha Baloch, only four kilometres from the pre-Harappan and Harappan settlement of Kot Diji. A small limestone ridge with layers of chert on the top is located to the south-east of the village. At a slightly higher level on the south-east side, there is a certain amount of moving sand, forming small dunes on the relatively hard surface of what appears to be an old silt terrace. Spread out over a largely sand-free area between dunes, are the Middle and upper Palaeolithic artefacts and factory debris.
A classified list of the collection shows the Middle Palaeolithic artefacts, flake cores of various types, different kinds of axe and flakes from prepared or previously struck cores, together making up 65 per cent of the artefact collection. Some characteristic upper Palaeolithic artefacts, blade cores and blades, make up about 22 per cent of the collection.
This all sounds pretty intriguing for those who are interested in history. They may find Dr Allchin’s book quite helpful in this regard, since here it is difficult to give a detailed account of the survey.
A decade ago, the importance of the Rohri Hills led to the beginning of a three-year (1993-95) co-operation of archaeological investigation between the Department of Archaeology, University of Shah Abdul Latif Khairpur and the Department of Historical Archaeological and Oriental Sciences, Venice, Italy, called the joint Indo-Pakistan Rohri Hills project. Its agenda comprised the study of the Harappan quarrying activities and the environmental reconstruction of the Rohri Hills landscape, at least from the fifth millennium BC onwards.
The project focused on the hills in the neighbourhood of the Shrine of Shadi Shaheed with a covered area of 2.5 square kilometres. It led to the discovery of 794 structures, mainly pits associated with workshops, scattered along the edges of the western terraces. And its quest for discovering is still on, because the Indus Valley civilization seems to have so much precious to be unearthed that it might take a pretty long time to find out what was it like in the past.
ACCORDING to a renowned archaeologist, Dr Bridget Allchin, the Indus Valley is a ‘green band’ that follows foothills of the steeply folded mountains of Balochistan, dividing them from the undulating sandy uplands of the Thar region.
