Online

Online articles on the ancient Indus Valley civilization, usually available as a PDF on another site like Academia.edu.

Looking beneath the Veneer Thoughts about Environmental and Cultural Diversity in the Indus Civilization

Cameron A. Petrie
"The recognition of variation and diversity [in the ancient Indus civilization] has encouraged a gradual, though not universally accepted, shift toward the interpretation that certain categories of Indus material acted as ‘a veneer… overlying diverse local and regional cultural expressions'," write the authors.

Indus and Mesopotamian Trade Networks: New Insights from Shell and Carnelian Artifacts

Jonathan Mark Kenoyer
A judicious review of the evidence for trade between the ancient Indus and Mesopotamia, with a focus on prestige objects like carnelian beads and shell bangles and the implications and questions we may draw from them about the nature of the connections between both civilizations.

Semantic scope of Indus inscriptions comprising taxation, trade and craft licensing, commodity control and access control: archaeological and script-internal evidence

Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay
The author brings together a great deal of information to argue that "inscribed stamp-seals were primarily used for enforcing certain rules involving taxation, trade/craft control, commodity control and access control," and in relating stamp seals and tablets, that "such tablets were possibly trade/craft/commodity-specific licenses issued to tax-collectors, traders, and artisans," (p. 1).

Lipid residues in pottery from the Indus Civilisation in northwest India

Akshyeta Suryanarayan
An exciting new study that looks at food residues ancient Indus pots found in sites around Rakigarhi to decode the foodstuffs that once were in those pots. By examining the lipids or fatty acids that can be extracted from pots and pottery fragments, investigators were able to determine some of the foodstuffs in the pots.

Animal movement on the hoof and on the cart and its implications for understanding exchange within the Indus Civilisation

Cameron A. Petrie
It seems to be an adage around the ancient Indus research that solving one mystery simply surfaces another. This is the case with this paper. It takes on the question of ground – land – transportation in ancient Indus times only to find that larger answers around transport remain fuzzy.

Mapping Archaeology While Mapping an Empire: Using Historical Maps to Reconstruct Ancient Settlement Landscapes in Modern India and Pakistan

Cameron A. Petrie
Science is slowly transforming ancient Indus studies, from DNA analysis of skeletons that point to migration and disease, to isotope analysis that reveals the distant origins of raw materials. One of the cleverest – and potentially rewarding i terms of increasing the number of ancient sites to investigate – must be the use of old maps.

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