An Archaeologist's Field Season in India

Field Notebook of an Archaeologist: Five Sites in India

1Day 1, Dholavira (Gujarat). The ruins sit on an island in the Rann of Kutch, a flat salt marsh. People began building here in about 3000 BCE, and it grew into a large Indus city. Rain is rare and falls in one short season. Stone-lined reservoirs, some cut deep into the rock, lie along the edges of the city, and channels once led water into them from two seasonal streams. Walls divide the city into an upper citadel, a middle town and a lower town. Near the north gate, excavators found ten large Indus signs that had once been set into a wooden board. I think the reservoirs show that people here planned ahead for long dry months.

2Day 4, Kalibangan (Rajasthan). Beneath the remains of the town lies a field with furrows that cross each other, dated to about 2800 BCE. It is one of the oldest plowed fields archaeologists have found. A farmer beside the site showed me that he still plows in crossing rows, so that two crops can grow in one field.

3Day 9, Kumhrar (Bihar). The modern city of Patna grew over Pataliputra, capital of the Maurya Empire, which Chandragupta Maurya founded in about 321 BCE. Here excavators uncovered the remains of a great hall that once had about 80 pillars of polished sandstone. Only one pillar is fairly complete. A book called the Arthashastra, traditionally credited to Chandragupta's adviser Kautilya, gives detailed advice on collecting taxes, paying officials and using spies. I think the hall was built for a powerful ruler's gatherings, but no inscription tells us its purpose.

4Day 12, Nalanda (Bihar). Rows of brick monasteries and lecture halls stretch across the site. Nalanda was founded in the 400s CE under the Gupta rulers and grew into a great Buddhist center of learning. In the 600s CE a Chinese monk named Xuanzang studied here for several years. In his travel record he described thousands of monks and students learning subjects such as logic, grammar and medicine.

5Day 15, Delhi. The Iron Pillar stands about 7 meters tall. It was made in about 400 CE, during the Gupta era, and an inscription on it praises a king named Chandra. After some 1,600 years outdoors, it shows very little rust. Gupta metalworkers clearly knew how to make high-quality iron.

6Note for my report. Earlier writers in India often used a dot to mark an empty place in a number. In 628 CE the mathematician Brahmagupta went further. He wrote rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying with zero as a number of its own, such as "a number minus itself is zero."