Place · Harappan town · India
Alamgirpur
The eastern limit of the Harappan spread, in Meerut district, Uttar Pradesh, on the Hindon river near the Yamuna. Excavated by Y.D. Sharma 1958-59, the site documents a small late Harappan settlement c.2000-1800 BCE at the furthest known reach of the Harappan tradition toward the Ganga-Yamuna doab. The pottery, seals and standard weights at Alamgirpur are late and derivative — the town functioned as an outpost of a declining network. The site's position marks the point at which the Harappan material culture dissolves into the Ochre Coloured Pottery culture that overlapped and succeeded it in the upper doab.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.000, 77.480
Connections (3)
- Eastern extensionMohenjo-daro
Alamgirpur on the Hindon near the Yamuna is the eastern limit of Harappan settlement, more than a thousand kilometres from Mohenjo-daro. Taken with Sutkagan Dor in the west and Daimabad in the south, it gives the civilisation an extent of something like a million square kilometres — larger than any contemporary Bronze Age world — held together by a shared material culture whose political form remains unknown.
- Succession in timeSanauli
Sanauli in the upper Doab and Alamgirpur on the Hindon are both at the eastern edge of the Harappan world and both around the end of the mature phase. Sanauli's cart burials, copper swords and helmet have no Harappan parallel at all, which is why what they represent — late Harappan, a different population, or something in between — is one of the most contested questions in Indian archaeology.
- Site adjacencyLahuradewa
Alamgirpur is the eastern limit of the Harappan spread and Lahuradewa lies four hundred kilometres further east in the middle Ganges plain, with rice and pottery claimed for the seventh millennium BCE. The two together mean the Ganges valley was not empty land waiting to be settled from the Indus: it had its own long neolithic before the cities in the west existed.
On these journeys
Sources
Alamgirpur excavation reports
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