Research ArticleA peaceful realm? Trauma and social differentiation at Harappa
Highlights
► The Indus Civilization has often been portrayed as an exceptionally peaceful, heterarchical state. ► We compared the prevalence of cranial trauma by sex and age in three burial communities. ► The rate of trauma increases through time; women are increasingly affected in the post-urban period. ► Men, women and children from the pit of skulls, located near the sewer drain outside the city wall, demonstrate the highest rate of injury. ► Our evidence indicates Harappan city life was not entirely peaceful and structural violence may have shaped the risk of violent injury.
Introduction
At the height of the Indus Civilization (period III, 2600–1900 B.C.), thousands of cities and towns covered a million square kilometers of territory in South Asia (Fig. 1). This world was centered around the seven rivers that traverse the Indus Valley, but Indus territory extended from the Pakistan–Iran border in the West to the Ganga-Jumna doab in the East; Punjab in the North to the Rann of Kutch in the South. This civilization is best known from excavations at urban centers, which have revealed large, well-organized settlements, sanitation facilities and water works, standardized weights and measures, an undeciphered script, craft specialization, and an economic interaction sphere that spanned Central Asia in the third millennium B.C. Over this vast territory, there is local variation evident in style, customs, and wares but there is also remarkable continuity in symbolism, town planning, subsistence practices, weights, measures, and even brick sizes (Kenoyer, 1998, Lahiri, 2000, McIntosh, 2008, Meadow, 1991, Possehl, 2002, Vats, 1940, Wheeler, 1947).
Contemporaneous civilizations in West Asia went through a well-documented process of urbanization and state formation that included social differentiation, centralized power, institutionalized religion, monumental architecture, control over access to resources, state sanctioned violence, exclusion, and similar mechanisms of social control (Akkermans and Schwartz, 2003, Lloyd, 2010, Pollock, 1999, Wenke, 2009, Wright, 2010). The Indus civilization apparently departs from this pattern of prehistoric state formation (Kenoyer, 1997, Kenoyer, 1998, Possehl, 1990, Possehl, 1998, Possehl, 2002, Ratnagar, 1991, Ratnagar, 2001, Shaffer, 1982, Wright, 2010), which has led archeologists to employ alternative concepts of state formation to explain the social changes we see in the third millennium B.C. The most widely used concept is that of the heterarchical state (Possehl, 1990, Possehl, 2002). The Indus Civilization has been constructed as a kind of corporation, a ‘grassroots’ government in which the population collectively assigned authority to political and religious leaders and only a weak hierarchical structure existed. The Indus Civilization has also consistently been described as exceptional in its peaceful egalitarianism (McIntosh, 2002, McIntosh, 2008) although the human skeletal material was not previously studied in regard to social differentiation, exclusion, or the presence of violence.
Analysis of burial treatment and paleoepidemiology provide an opportunity to test the characterization of Indus society as an exceptionally peaceful realm. When bone tissue is injured, the assault is recorded in the human skeleton. Archeological records of these injuries include fractures, signs of healing, and sometimes infection in the human skeletal material. In this paper, we use these signs on the skeleton to infer the biosocial implications of urbanization, and its disintegration. We will reconstruct the mechanisms, patterning, and prevalence of injury for three burial communities at Harappa, which span the urban and post-urban time frame. Finally, we examine the evidence for social differentiation and structured risks for violence across time, sex, and burial treatment to test this hypothesis that Harappa was an exceptionally ‘peaceful realm’ without significant social differentiation.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
This analysis is based on human skeletal remains excavated from the Indus Civilization site of Harappa (30°37′ North latitude, 72°52′ East longitude) (Fig. 2). Excavations began at Harappa in 1929 and 26 field seasons have occurred since that time (see Vats, 1940, Wheeler, 1947, Wheeler, 1953, Dales and Kenoyer, 1991, Meadow, 1991). Harappa began as a small city founded on the southern bank of the Ravi River around 3800 B.C. and it grew relatively slowly for a millennium. The initial settlement
Results
This project examined incomplete skeletal remains from 160 individuals excavated from three burial areas at Harappa. Age and sex were indeterminate for 68 individuals (42.5%) due to incompleteness of the remains and/or poor preservation (Table 1). Of the remainder, sex was not estimated for 33 (20.6%) immature individuals. Of 59 adults remaining, there were 24 young adults (40.7%), 14 middle aged adults (23.7%), and 15 older adults (25.4%). Fifty-eight individuals (36.3% of individuals
Discussion
Trauma affects skeletal elements differently depending on the size, shape, and composition of the bone, the size and shape of the instrument that impacted the bone, and the force of the impact (Arbour, 2008). Thus, bioarcheologists can infer the proximate cause of injuries from an examination of the type, location, and shape of traumatic lesions. In our discussion, our first responsibility is to address the question of whether the data presented here represent evidence for post-mortem or
Conclusions
It is important to understand that bioarcheological analyses are impacted by incomplete, unexcavated, and poorly preserved skeletal material. For example, the prevalence of trauma reported here only reflects the burials that were excavated, and the individuals with crania preserved for analysis. Our interpretations cannot represent the much larger numbers of dead who were not buried at Harappa, nor the living population.
However, based on the evidence for violent injury at Harappa, we argue that
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship from the United States India Educational Foundation. Anthropological Survey of India allowed access to the collections and the Kolkata office staff provided research support. The authors would like to extend our appreciation to Rana Chakravarty, Shevanti Narayan, Sumanta Basu, Ambi Parasuram, and Laxmi Parasuram for logistical support. We would also like to thank Kamal K. Misra, Subhash Walimbe, Dilip Roy, and Ranjana Ray for their
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2019, Journal of Archaeological Science: ReportsCitation Excerpt :The Mature Harappan period is characterized by well-planned urban centers. According to excavation reports published to date, the big cities seem to have exercised remarkable influence over thousands of satellite towns, villages and settlements by means of a well-organized bureaucracy and consistent symbolic and ideological systems (Coningham and Young, 2015; Gupta, 1999; Robbins Schug, 2017; Robbins Schug et al., 2012; Shinde, 2016b). As for the skeletons found at Harappa, the center of the Harappan Civilization, anthropologists have analyzed evident signs of trauma (Lovell, 2014; Robbins Schug et al., 2012), their data indicating prevalence and pattern of traumatic injury and interpersonal violence in Harappan society (Lovell, 1997; Walker, 2001; Wedel and Galloway, 1999).
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