Place · Harappan settlement & cemetery · India
Farmana
The Harappan settlement and cemetery at Farmana in Rohtak district, Haryana — excavated by the Deccan College and the Rohtak University team under Vasant Shinde from 2007-2013. The excavations documented a 24-hectare Mature Harappan settlement (c.2600-1900 BCE) with 70 excavated burials in the associated cemetery — the largest Harappan cemetery excavated outside Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. The burial pattern shows significant regional variation from the Sindh-Punjab cemetery types: supine extended burials with grave goods including pottery, personal ornaments and shell bangles. The 2009-2015 ancient DNA studies of Farmana burials (one of the first successful Harappan DNA extractions) and the stable isotope analysis documented the diet and migration patterns of mature Harappan populations. The site is central to current debates on Harappan social organisation.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Tradition
- South Asian archaeology
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.170, 76.140
Connections (1)
- AnalogueChanhudaro
Chanhudaro has workshops and no citadel; Farmana has a cemetery of seventy burials whose orientation and grave goods differ from Harappa's. Between them they undercut the textbook picture of a uniform civilisation of twin-mound cities: the network had specialised production towns and real regional variation in how it buried its dead.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Farmana”. Archaeological Survey of India excavation reports; J.M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation (1998).
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