Delhi. Among the excavations in India undertaken or begun during this period were those at Rupar in Punjab, Alamgirpur in the Doab, Rangpur and Lothal in Gujarat, and Kalibangan in the dried-up Ghaggar Valley in Rajasthan (Pande 1982, 397–398). In Pakistan, the major breakthrough at Kot Diji led to the premise of a continuity between the earlier Kot Diji culture and the later Indus civilization level at the site, and at Amri, there were further elaborations of Majumdar’s work during the preceding phase. Some miscellaneous work in Baluchistan highlighted the early character of village farming communities in the region. Along the Makran coast, the “port” character of the Indus site of Sutkagendor was highlighted, especially in the context of new discoveries in the Gulf area throwing light on its contact with the Indus civilization (annual volumes of Pakistan Archaeology, a government publication from 1964 onward).

Third Phase (1964–1984)

Beginning in about 1964, the third phase lasted up to the mid-1980s. This phase perhaps began with G.F. Dales’s publication on the mythical massacre at Mohenjo Daro (Dales 1964), in which the improbability that the city fell to Aryan invaders was argued graphically. The excavations at Kalibangan in Rajasthan (Lal 1979) continued through the 1960s, and excavations began during this period at Surkotada in Kutch in northwestern India (Joshi 1990) and at Banawali (Bisht 1982, 1987) in Haryana. In Pakistan, this phase witnessed the beginning of a massive structural and other documentation project at Mohenjo Daro, including an intensive surface survey to locate craft-activity areas (Jansen and Urban 1984, 1987). A late level of the civilization was identified at Daimabad (Sali 1986) in the Godavari Valley of Maharashtra, and a mature form of the civilization was located at Shortughai, around the Indus River in India (Francfort 1989).

In Pakistan, the discovery of a large number of sites from the presumably fifth millennium b.c. Hakra ware phase to the late “Harappan/Indus” horizon of the second millennium b.c. in the dried-up Hakra drainage system in Bahawalpur (Mughal 1982) was a major event. In India, it was found that the entire area between the Ghaggar course in Rajasthan (known as the Hakra in Pakistan) and Saharanpur in the Doab was dotted with early, mature, and late sites. Another major discovery was that of the Ganeshwar-Jodhpura culture in the Sikar district of Rajasthan, a culture contemporary with the early phase of the civilization. The northernmost extension of the Indus sites in India was found at Manda in Jammu, and in Gujarat, too, there were major discoveries during this phase, notably in Kutch (Joshi, Bala, and Ram 1984).

Ideas regarding the origin and decline of the civilization took some specific forms during this period. On the basis of earlier work at Amri and Kot Diji and the ongoing work at Kalibangan, a. ghosh (1965) argued in favor of a homogeneous pre-Harappan substratum in the entire Harappan distribution area. Other scholars also favored such a hypothesis, which was put on a more solidly documented basis by R. Mughal (1971). However, the reason for the transformation from the early to the mature Harappan was not explained, which left scope for factors such as long-distance trade and proto-Elamite influence to be invoked as catalytic factors in the genesis of the Indus civilization. Radiocarbon chronology was applied to this civilization in the early 1960s (Agrawal 1964), but so far it has not been able to dislodge the Wheeler bracket of 2500–1500 b.c., an attempt at calibration (Brunswig 1975) and evidence of pre-Sargonic contact with Mesopotamia (Chakrabarti 1982) notwithstanding. The quest for Aryans is not yet over (cf. Hiebert and Lamberg-Karlovsky 1992).

On the whole, however, there was no difficulty at all in visualizing the late phase of the Indus civilization as transformation into an essentially nonurban form that developed regional characters in all the relevant areas. Subsistence (Vishnu-Mittre and Savithri 1982; Weber 1991), trade (Chakrabarti 1990; Lahiri 1992, 67–144; Ratnagar 1981; Shaffer 1982), metallurgy (Agrawal 1971), script (Mahadevan 1977), miscellaneous craft behavior such as the manufacturing of shell bangles and beads (Hegde, Karanth, and Sychanthavong 1982; Kenoyer 1984), etc., began to be subjected to detailed study. In the early 1980s, the “Neolithic” discovery at Mehrgarh in the Bolan Valley