Urban Development In Ancient India

A Companion to South Asia in the Past provides the definitive overview of research and knowledge about South Asia’s past, from the Pleistocene to the historic era in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, provided by a truly global team of experts. The most comprehensive and detailed scholarly treatment of South Asian archaeology and biological anthropology, providing ground-breaking new ideas and future challenges Provides an in-depth and broad view of the current state of knowledge about South Asia’s past, from the Pleistocene to the historic era in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal A comprehensive treatment of research in a crucial region for human evolution and biocultural adaptation A global team of scholars together present a varied set of perspectives on South Asian pre- and proto-history

This book offers a definitive archaeological perspective on the history of early urban growth in India. It does this by looking at both the protohistoric and the early historic periods, coming down to about AD 300 and later. Geographically, it covers all the major areas of the subcontinent. The existing archaeological data have been synthesized to yield a comprehensive picture of the morphology of ancient sites and their place within what is currently known of their settlement perspectives. This book addresses itself to some of the cardinal issues of South Asian archaeology - the origin and decline of the Indus civilization; the issue of its merger in the main flow of India's later cultural development; the archaeological basis of its long chronology; aspects of Indus urbanism; the reasons for the growth of neolithic-chalcolithic inner India; and the patterns and problems of urban growth in the early historic period on the subcontinental scale. In each case the author's concern is with understanding the situation at the grassroots level within an essentially South Asian framework. The hypotheses offered in this book should lead to some major rethinking about the story of archaeological development in the subcontinent.