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The topographic and environmental context of the earliest village sites in western South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

C.A. Petrie  and
K.D. Thomas
C.A. Petrie
Affiliation:
Division of Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3DZ, UK
K.D. Thomas
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31–34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK
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Extract

Researchers in several continents have found that agriculture began not in major river valleys but up in the hills, where early farmers tended crops on alluvial fans and improved irrigation by building earth barriers across them. Here the authors reveal a similar process in the hills of Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where early farming villages overlook the plains of the Punjab and Sindh, heartland of the later Indus civilisation. Today this is a troubled border zone, with difficult access on the ground, but our researchers make exemplary use of satellite survey to map the villages in their specific local environments.

Keywords

South Asiaearly villagesenvironmenttopographyagriculture
Type
Research article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 86 , Issue 334 , December 2012 , pp. 1055 - 1067
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2012

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