A young couple's grave found in the Rakhigarhi cemetery of the Harappan Civilization

Shinde, Vasant; Lee, Hyejin; Yadav, Yogesh; Waghmare, Pranjali; Jadhav, Nilesh; Hong, Jong Ha; Kim, Yong Jun; Shin, Dong Hoon

doi:10.5115/acb.2018.51.3.200

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Notable among the Rakhigarhi data are a number of multiple burials, a practice held over from the preurban contexts (Ajithprasad 2018), and also attested in Cemetery R-37 at Harappa. Multiple bodies were sometimes interred in a single grave, such as at Lothal (Pal 2014) and at Farmana, which excavators interpreted as a one-off interment of individuals who died around the same time (Shinde et al 2018a). At Harappa, children and infants were not buried with pottery or ornaments (Robbins Schug n.d.).…”

Section: Equal Distributions Of Burial Wealthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

Green

2020

J Archaeol Res

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The cities of the Indus civilization were expansive and planned with large-scale architecture and sophisticated Bronze Age technologies. Despite these hallmarks of social complexity, the Indus lacks clear evidence for elaborate tombs, individual-aggrandizing monuments, large temples, and palaces. Its first excavators suggested that the Indus civilization was far more egalitarian than other early complex societies, and after nearly a century of investigation, clear evidence for a ruling class of managerial elites has yet to materialize. The conspicuous lack of political and economic inequality noted by Mohenjo-daro’s initial excavators was basically correct. This is not because the Indus civilization was not a complex society, rather, it is because there are common assumptions about distributions of wealth, hierarchies of power, specialization, and urbanism in the past that are simply incorrect. The Indus civilization reveals that a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity.

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Section: Equal Distributions Of Burial Wealthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization

Green

2020

J Archaeol Res

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Ritual, Urbanism, and the Everyday: Mortuary Behavior in the Indus Civilization

Schug

2020

Bioarchaeology and Social Theory

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Human skeletal material from archaeological sites is the most important source of evidence about embodied experience, habitual behaviors, and aspects of health in past people. Within bioarchaeology's broad area of inquiry, analysis of mortuary behavior (particularly when combined with paleopathology) is potentially the most critical tool for archaeologists to reconstruct ritual and meaning in the past. This work typically combines embodiment and practice theory to examine the importance of ritual, its contours, and its social function. This chapter asks what we mean by "ritual" and how "ritual" emerges from mortuary artifacts and features. This chapter seeks to move away from mortuary ritual as a distinct category of behavior in the Indus context, separate from a secular life in the urban environment. I argue that mortuary behavior for individuals in the Indus civilization varies because of the nature of the heterogeneous populations that occupied these urban settlements but perhaps also that mortuary and other ritual behaviors in the Indus civilization were entangled, enmeshed, and interacted with the everyday heterogeneity of people's life in the urban environment. While there is no common tradition apparent within or among all Indus cities, what is clear is that the urban lifestyle and environment participated in creating diverse rituals performed in a funerary context and that participation would contribute to memories of the cities long after their decline. Evidence is drawn from mortuary archaeology and objects, bodies and emergent behaviors, pathophysiology and health. These ritual and everyday dimensions of life in South Asia's first urban period speak to the deepest anthropological questions we can ask about meaning in the past and how it was lived in the urban context.

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