HYDERABAD: An archaeology expert has lamented that unfortunately, 100 years down the road after unearthing of Moenjodaro the country has not explored any other similar site though there must be more such cities and sites and “we need to keep searching them”.

Prof Dr Mohammad Hameed, head the Department of Archaeology, Punjab University, said at the 7th Dr N.A. Baloch National seminar organised at a local hotel by Dr N.A. Baloch Institute of Heritage Research, Jamshoro, and Sindh Culture and Tourism Department on Sunday that a replica of Moenjodaro town should be created to connect present day society with the Indus Valley Civilisation to help people understand how human settlements functioned then and how people managed their economic life.

He emphasised the need for producing PhD scholars on Indus Valley Civilisation and exploring more such sites which had unfortunately not been done so far.

In his presentation on “where do we stand after a century” in a session of the seminar on ‘celebrating centenary of discovery of Indus Civilisation’, the professor said that most of the exploration and research had been done by foreigners. “We live here. It’s our land and we understand issues with clear context of culture more than foreigners. But unfortunately, we lag behind in research on Indus Civilisation,” he said, wondering could indigenous experts challenge foreigners’ work.

He said: “We can preserve Moenjodaro effectively after making research-driven endeavours”. The Moenjodaro population presented the concept of urbanised living with sectoral approach. “It shows their economic life was prosperous. They used to store grain and had better urbanised planning. We need to understand how decline had set in,” he said.

Mr Hameed said that Indus Civilisation held central place in the identity of the region followed by Gandhara, Mughal, Sikh and then colonial civilisations.

He praised the fact that Sindh had done some better work for the preservation than other provinces. “Population of that era must have ideas of celebrating festivals and towns as well as villages. But we aren’t able to explore more cites,” he said.

He said their regional variations and settlement patterns needed to be explored.

“Unfortunately, 100 years down the road we haven’t explored any other site of note. There must be more such cities and sites. We need to keep searching them,” he said. He said that the people of Moenjodaro believed in ‘life after death’ regardless of their religion.

The scholar regretted that specialised studies were not getting due attention, forcing scholars to rely on foreign supervisors. “It shows we have a weak research based initiative on the subject. We have taken the site for granted and have average studies on art, pottery, etc,” he said, urging experts to ponder over whether the site had become a burden and are we taking proper care of it.

He called for synchronising work of different departments under Moenjodaro’s umbrella to have more manpower and better results. From tourism point of view, 30pc spending was seen for Sikh tourism, 20pc each for Gandhara and Mughals and 10pc for Indus Valley at national level, he said.

He proposed that Moenjodaro should be connected to present day society. “A replica of Moenjodaro should be created to connect people with it to enable them to experience how population used to live then. Let tourists feel they are living with people of Moenjodaro,” he said, adding that hypothetical life of Moenjodaro should artificially be reconstructed,” he said.

Dr Kaleem Lashari discussed details of a dry-core drilling project for establishing limits of Moenjodaro to avoid any step that might accidentally harm the site in future. Various samples were collected in the project for geological cum archaeological study, he said.

Dr Asma Hameed presented her scientific presentation on the use of strontium with regard to Moenjodaro and discussed her findings based on some tests carried out in laboratories.

She said that she had taken 40 samples to determine whether the Moenjodaro population belonged to this part of the region and they were from some other region.

Dr Abdul Ghaffar Soomro, who chaired the seminar, talked about Dr N.A. Baloch’s work on Moenjodaro and discussed his book Deewan-e-Gul.

He said author of the deewan Gul Mohammad, who had added two more alphabets to Sindhi script while raising questions over 52 alphabets of Sindhi’s Arabic script introduced by colonial regime. Deewan-e-Gul, he said, was the first deewan in Sindhi, he added.

Prof Dr Saleem Akthar read out his paper on his book Sindh under the Mughals while Mohammad Hafeez Khan talked about “Multan under Soomro’s 150 years rule”.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2022