Place · pre-Harappan type site · Pakistan
Amri
A low mound on the right bank of the Indus in Dadu district that fixes the chronology of Sindh before the Harappans. N. G. Majumdar dug it in 1929 and Jean-Marie Casal between 1959 and 1962, and Casal's four-period sequence showed a pre-Harappan occupation cleanly overlain by a Mature Harappan one — among the clearest such stratigraphies in the lower Indus. Its painted buff ware, geometric bands with ibex and humped cattle, gives the Amri–Nal culture of the fourth millennium its name.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 25.910, 67.924
Worth knowing
Casal's Period I to IV at Amri is still the frame in which pre-Harappan Sindh is dated, so a small mound in Dadu district sets the clock for everything around it.
Connections (3)
- In the same set asKot Diji
The two sites that between them define Sindh before the Harappan cities. Amri, on the right bank in Dadu district, gives its name to the Amri phase and its painted buff ware; Kot Diji, up the river in Khairpur, gives its name to the Kot Dijian. Casal's sequence at Amri and F. A. Khan's at Kot Diji were excavated within about thirty years of each other and are still the two columns any fourth-millennium find in the lower Indus is dated against. Both show their own phase overlain directly by Mature Harappan.
- PrecursorMohenjo-daro
Amri matters for Mohenjo-daro because it has what Mohenjo-daro's waterlogged lower levels will not give up: a clean pre-urban sequence underneath the Harappan one. Casal dug four periods between 1959 and 1962 and found Amri's own painted-pottery culture directly overlain by Mature Harappan material, which put a stratigraphic floor under the question of where the cities came from. The great city thirty kilometres downriver cannot be excavated to its beginnings because the water table stops the trench, so the small mound supplies the chronology the large one withholds.
- In the same set asSohr Damb, Nal
The Amri–Nal culture of fourth-millennium Balochistan and Sindh is named from these two mounds, and the naming records a real link: Nal polychrome pottery turns up in the Amri levels and Amri wares at Nal. Sohr Damb's painters worked in black outline filled with red, blue and yellow on a buff ground, the most ambitious ceramic palette in the subcontinent for the next two millennia; Amri's is soberer, geometric bands with ibex. The German re-excavation at Nal from 2001 and Casal's at Amri are the two sequences the culture is dated by.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Amri, Sindh”. J.-M. Casal, Fouilles d'Amri (1964); N. G. Majumdar, Explorations in Sind (1934).
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