Current Studies on the Indus Civilization (Volume- I)

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It is my pleasure to launch this book series, a collaboration between the Indus Project at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature and Manohar Publishers & Distributors.

The full title of our RIHN project is ‘Environmental Change and the Indus Civilization’. The project unites a range of internationally recognized and interdisciplinary scholars in order to investigate the causes of the rapid decline of the Indus civilization, almost four thousand years ago.

Volumes in the book series will present the project's latest results as described by the full variety of scholars collaborating in the project. Reflecting our interdisciplinary approach, each volume will include authors belonging to both the natural sciences and humanities, scholars who belong to disciplines as distinct as archaeology, geography, linguistics, anthropology, and botany.

This first volume consists of four papers: two written by archeologists, one by an archaeo-botanist and one by a linguist. The papers were originally published as ‘Occasional Paper 3’ at RIHN in 2008. I would like to briefly introduce the contributors in this volume.

Dorian Fuller of the Institute of Archaeology, University College, London, also visited RIHN in 2007 as a member of Professor Yo-Ichiro Sato’s project ‘Agriculture and Environment Interactions in Eurasia: Past, Present and Future.’ He is a most active archaeo-botanist working in South Asia.

Qasid Mallah of Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan, is an archaeologist interested in the Sindh area. He was a visiting researcher at RIHN from April to September 2007.

Roger Blench is a widely recognized linguist. His major field of research is African linguistics, but his interest extends to many languages around the world, including those of South Asia. He was one of the editors of Archaeology and Languages, the four-volume proceedings of the Archaeological World Congress held in Delhi in 1994.

Shinde is a core member of our project and the leader of excavations in Haryana, India. In this volume he has composed the preliminary field report on the three study sites-Farmana, Mithathal, and Girawad-all located in the state of Haryana. Full reports on our excavations, which Kharakwal, another core project member, also oversees, will be published in the volumes to follow.

The main phase of the RIHN Indus Project began in April 2007 and will last until March 2012. We look forward to publishing several additional volumes as our research progresses, and to further developing interdisciplinary understanding of the Indus civilization and the causes of its decline.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Mr. Ramesh Jain of Manohar for republishing the Occasional Papers which were originally published by RIHN non-commercially. Without his keen interest and cooperation, it would have been impossible for us to make such a quality edition available for a discerning readership.

**Sample Pages**