alluvium of Baluchistan provided a very long rural antecedent to the development of civilization in the Indus region.

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Lower city with well shaft at Mohenjo Daro, Pakistan

(AAA)

Current Phase (1985– )

Since the mid-1980s, the study of the Indus civilization has been in its fourth and current phase. In India, this phase is likely to be dominated by the ongoing excavations at Dholavira in Kutch (Bisht 1991), which have already added new features to Harappan planning, water management, stonemason’s work, etc. The discovery of a few large script signs, made of carefully cut crystalline material and presumably set on a wooden board, has also led to a fresh appreciation of the extent of Harappan literacy. This site has also shown the entire archaeological sequence of this civilization in Kutch, including its early and later phases. In Pakistan, this is the phase of prolonged excavations at Harappa, especially in its eastern sector, and the stratigraphic and cultural details that have already emerged (Dales 1992) help us to understand this civilization, as at Dholavira, as an integral part of a deep-rooted cultural development and its subsequent transformation.

On the theoretical side there is now a marked contrast between an approach centered on western Asia and an approach that favors an indigenous framework of development and transformation. The first approach favors a short chronology for the civilization and restricts it, by implication, to the status of being a mere episode in the history of south asia. Second, this approach puts an inordinate amount of emphasis on external trade with various areas in western and central Asia. For instance, western archaeologists who work in Oman argue that Oman was the main supplier of copper to the Indus civilization, despite the very large presence of copper on the subcontinent. In contrast, the indigenous approach argues for a long chronology, cites ethnographic data to argue that the civilization’s external trade was not characteristically different from the trade that continued well into the twentieth century in this region overall, and provides a scheme that helps to understand the civilization as an integral part of the total process of Indian history and culture.

Basically, there were apparently two major variables in the emergence of the Indus civilization. First, the sites in the Indus Valley shift to