Traumatic injury in a cranium found at Rakhigarhi cemetery of Harappan civilization as anthropological evidence of interpersonal violence

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

doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2018.11.001

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…While there are not considerable discrepancies in the wealth interred with different individuals, there are instances of interpersonal violence and a long-term trend of increases in the occurrence of particular kinds of pathologies (Kennedy 2002;Lee et al 2019Lovell 2016Robbins Schug and Blevins 2016;Robbins Schug et al 2012. The documented violence during the Urban phase at Harappa comes exclusively from multiple burials (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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“…It is also very important to recognize that evidence for traumatic injuries is not limited to Harappa. There is evidence for traumatic injuries at Mohenjo Daro (Kennedy 1990), Kalibangan (Sharma 1999), Rakhigarhi (Lee et al 2019), Farmana (Mushrif Tripathy and Shinde 2019), and Lothal (Sarkar 1972(Sarkar , 1985. Thus, although the mortuary traditions are not held in common across different cities in different areas of the Indus civilization, there are common elements; the evidence of interpersonal violence is among those common elements.…”

Section: Harappamentioning

confidence: 99%

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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Traumatic injury in a cranium found at Rakhigarhi cemetery of Harappan civilization as anthropological evidence of interpersonal violence

Cited by 2 publications

References 10 publications

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

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

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

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