Landscapes, soils, and mound histories of the Upper Indus Valley, Pakistan: new insights on the Holocene environments near ancient Harappa

Schuldenrein, Joseph; Wright, R. P.; Mughal, M. Rafique; Khan, Mahmood Ahmad

doi:10.1016/j.jas.2003.10.015

Cited by 29 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…However, the lack of large-scale incision on the interfluve demonstrates that large, glacier-fed rivers did not flow across the Ghaggar-Hakra region during the Holocene. Existing chronologies (27,28) and our own age on the bank of Sutlej (SI Text) identified deposits of Late Pleistocene age, indicating that the interfluve formed instead during the last glacial period. Provenance detection (32) suggests that the Yamuna may have contributed sediment to this region during the last glacial period, but switched to the Ganges basin before Harappan times.…”

Section: Morphodynamics Of the Indo-gangetic Plainmentioning

confidence: 84%

Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization

Giosan

Clift

Macklin

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

272

241

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The collapse of the Bronze Age Harappan, one of the earliest urban civilizations, remains an enigma. Urbanism flourished in the western region of the Indo-Gangetic Plain for approximately 600 y, but since approximately 3,900 y ago, the total settled area and settlement sizes declined, many sites were abandoned, and a significant shift in site numbers and density towards the east is recorded. We report morphologic and chronologic evidence indicating that fluvial landscapes in Harappan territory became remarkably stable during the late Holocene as aridification intensified in the region after approximately 5,000 BP. Upstream on the alluvial plain, the large Himalayan rivers in Punjab stopped incising, while downstream, sedimentation slowed on the distinctive mega-fluvial ridge, which the Indus built in Sindh. This fluvial quiescence suggests a gradual decrease in flood intensity that probably stimulated intensive agriculture initially and encouraged urbanization around 4,500 BP. However, further decline in monsoon precipitation led to conditions adverse to both inundation-and rain-based farming. Contrary to earlier assumptions that a large glacier-fed Himalayan river, identified by some with the mythical Sarasvati, watered the Harappan heartland on the interfluve between the Indus and Ganges basins, we show that only monsoonal-fed rivers were active there during the Holocene. As the monsoon weakened, monsoonal rivers gradually dried or became seasonal, affecting habitability along their courses. Hydroclimatic stress increased the vulnerability of agricultural production supporting Harappan urbanism, leading to settlement downsizing, diversification of crops, and a drastic increase in settlements in the moister monsoon regions of the upper Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.Indus Valley | floods | droughts | climate change | archaeology T he Harappan or Indus Civilization (1-8) developed at the arid outer edge of the monsoonal rain belt (9, Fig. 1) and largely depended on river water for agriculture (10). The Harappans settled the Indus plain over a territory larger than the contemporary extent of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined (Figs. 2 and 3). Between the Indus and Ganges watersheds, a now largely defunct smaller drainage system, the Ghaggar-Hakra, was also heavily populated during Harappan times (4, 5). Controlled by the Indian monsoon and the melting of Himalayan snow and glaciers (2,11,12), the highly variable hydrologic regime, with recurring droughts and floods, must have been a critical concern for Harappans, as it is today for almost a billion people living on the Indo-Gangetic Plain in Pakistan, northern India, and Bangladesh. In such challenging environmental conditions, both the development and the decline of the Harappan remain equally puzzling (13). We investigate how climate change affected this civilization by focusing on fluvial morphodynamics, which constitutes a critical gap in our current understanding of the Harappan in the way it affects habitability and human settlement patterns near rivers in...

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Section: Morphodynamics Of the Indo-gangetic Plainmentioning

confidence: 84%

Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization

Giosan

Clift

Macklin

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

272

241

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Feedbacks are weakened by technological interventions (Brown and Lall, 2006). For example, pre-industrial societies living in floodplains were directly and negatively impacted by flooding and avulsions, which may have caused the abandonment of cities in the Indus Valley and Middle East (An Heyvaert and Baeteman, 2008;Schuldenrein et al, 2004). Contemporary industrial societies, however, persist in floodplains despite periodic destructive events (Di Baldassarre et al, 2009), using technological (e.g., levees) and economic (e.g., insurance) mechanisms to militate against flooding.…”

Section: Challenge 4: Social Factors Underlying Coupled Human-water Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hydrologists have already attempted empirical reconstructions of hydrological change and water system histories in specific locations, generally motivated by the need to understand the genesis of contemporary hydrological problems (An Heyvaert and Baeteman, 2008;Merritts et al, 2011;Nicholson, 1979;Schuldenrein et al, 2004). While empirically informative, these studies could also provide valuable theoretical test beds for co-evolutionary models over decadal-to century-scale time frames.…”

Section: Hydrologic Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

Thompson

Sivapalan

Harman

et al. 2013

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

130

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Abstract.Globally, many different kinds of water resources management issues call for policy-and infrastructure-based responses. Yet responsible decision-making about water resources management raises a fundamental challenge for hydrologists: making predictions about water resources on decadal-to century-long timescales. Obtaining insight into hydrologic futures over 100 yr timescales forces researchers to address internal and exogenous changes in the properties of hydrologic systems. To do this, new hydrologic research must identify, describe and model feedbacks between water and other changing, coupled environmental subsystems. These models must be constrained to yield useful insights, despite the many likely sources of uncertainty in their predictions. Chief among these uncertainties are the impacts of the increasing role of human intervention in the global water cycle -a defining challenge for hydrology in the Anthropocene. Here we present a research agenda that proposes a suite of strategies to address these challenges from the perspectives of hydrologic science research. The research agenda focuses on the development of co-evolutionary hydrologic modeling to explore coupling across systems, and to address the implications of this coupling on the long-time behavior of the coupled systems. Three research directions support the development of these models: hydrologic reconstruction, comparative hydrology and model-data learning. These strategies focus on understanding hydrologic processes and feedbacks over long timescales, across many locations, and through strategic coupling of observational and model data in specific systems. We highlight the value of use-inspired and team-based science that is motivated by real-world hydrologic problems but targets improvements in fundamental understanding to support decision-making and management. Fully realizing the potential of this approach will ultimately require detailed integration of social science and physical science understanding of water systems, and is a priority for the developing field of sociohydrology.

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“…Still, the two types of data we require for evaluating urban origins (i.e., deep excavations that reach the earliest habitation levels of large sites and regional surveys around large sites to identify diachronic developments) are limited. The principal regional surveys of urban hinterlands have been undertaken around Harappa and Ganweriwala, both of which owe their inception to M. Rafique Mughal, who has assembled and encouraged numerous teams to document the range of archaeological sites that are fast-disappearing due to modern cultivation practices and population growth (Mughal, 1997;Wright et al, 2004Wright et al, , 2005a. In particular, the surveys around Harappa have identified the environmental parameters of population growth in the region, in which the early inhabitants of the area took advantage of a relatively diverse environment with a rich agricultural potential.…”

Section: Urban Developments Of the Indus (Harappan) Period (2500-1900mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, the surveys around Harappa have identified the environmental parameters of population growth in the region, in which the early inhabitants of the area took advantage of a relatively diverse environment with a rich agricultural potential. Starting around 3300 B.C., Harappa and other settlements were located on raised uplands above a surrounding floodplain capable of supporting agriculture and animal husbandry as well as having populations of wild fish and game (Belcher and Belcher, 2000;Schuldenrein et al, 2004).…”

Section: Urban Developments Of the Indus (Harappan) Period (2500-1900mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Archaeology of South Asian Cities

Smith

2006

J Archaeol Res

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Urbanism in the Indian subcontinent occurred in three distinct time periods in which cultural cohesion over large regions is archaeologically demonstrated through the architecture and artifacts of social, ritual, and economic activity. In the Indus (2500-1900 B.C.) and Early Historic (3rd century B.C. to 4th century A.D.) periods, cities were not necessarily tied to political territories or guided by strong political leaders, but by the Medieval period (after the 9th century A.D.), urban zones were the base for political growth, warfare, and aggrandizement. The comparison of these three eras is undertaken within a framework for defining cities that balances quantitative criteria such as population size and areal extent with two types of qualitative criteria: internal specialization on the basis of materials found within archaeological sites, and external specialization on the basis of data recovered through regional analysis. Cities from the three eras also are evaluated from the perspective of the ordinary inhabitant through the examination of the social, religious, and economic factors that prompted and rewarded urban residence. While the Indus and Early Historic cities were attractive because of the networks of opportunity found there, Medieval cities additionally benefitted from a "push" factor as ordinary inhabitants allied themselves to urban areas in times of political stress and uncertainty.

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Landscapes, soils, and mound histories of the Upper Indus Valley, Pakistan: new insights on the Holocene environments near ancient Harappa

Cited by 29 publications

References 16 publications

Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization

Fluvial landscapes of the Harappan civilization

Developing predictive insight into changing water systems: use-inspired hydrologic science for the Anthropocene

The Archaeology of South Asian Cities

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