Mehrgarh
▶ Explore on the map
Mehrgarh, in the Bolan pass of Baluchistan, is one of the earliest farming settlements of south Asia, occupied from about 7000 to 5500 BCE. Jean-Francois Jarrige began digging there in 1974 and found a sequence of houses of mud brick, with burials under the floors and graves containing beads, baskets and the bones of sheep, goats and cattle. Wheat and barley were cultivated, and the earliest evidence in the subcontinent of cotton weaving appears here. The people made simple unglazed pottery in the early period, then painted wares, and they worked shell, lapis lazuli and turquoise, trading along routes that reached Iran and the Persian Gulf. Flint tools were struck with a technique unusual for the region, and drills were used to bore beads. By the fourth millennium the settlement had grown into a planned town with a cemetery divided into family plots. Mehrgarh is significant because it shows farming arriving in the Indus region independently of Mesopotamia, and because the site's descendants are visible in the cities of the Indus valley that followed. Burials were made under house floors, a practice that continued into the Indus cities, and children were buried in jars with the care given to adults.