Place · unexcavated Harappan city · Pakistan
Ganweriwala
The large Harappan city at Ganweriwala in Cholistan district of Bahawalpur division, Pakistan, in the Thar desert on the dry Hakra palaeochannel. At an estimated 80 hectares, Ganweriwala is one of the five largest Harappan sites — rivalling Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in area — but has never been systematically excavated. The surface collection includes seals, pottery and figurines of mature Harappan date (c.2500-1900 BCE). Its position on the Hakra, deep in what is now desert, is central to the question of what climate change did to the Harappan network at the end of the third millennium. Rafique Mughal's 1970s survey remains the main documentation.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.380, 71.050 (approximate)
Connections (4)
- AnalogueBurzahom
Burzahom's pit dwellings, bone tools and dog burials point north and east — to Central Asia and the Chinese neolithic — rather than to the Indus or the peninsula, and the Kashmir valley is the one part of the subcontinent whose prehistory belongs to a different world. Ganweriwala and the Harappan sites are four hundred kilometres away across the Pir Panjal and have almost nothing in common with it.
- AnalogueDholavira
Ganweriwala and Dholavira are both among the largest sites of the civilisation and are known in completely different degrees: one has been excavated over decades and published in detail, the other has never been properly dug. Any statement about how many Harappan cities there were, or how they were organised, has to carry that asymmetry with it.
- Site adjacencyDerawar Fort
Derawar's forty bastions stand on the dry bed of the Hakra in Cholistan, and Ganweriwala — one of the five largest Harappan cities, still essentially undug — is on the same palaeochannel. A ninth-century desert fort and a Bronze Age city mark the course of a river that has not run for four thousand years, which is why both are in the middle of sand.
- River adjacencySaraswati
Ganweriwala lies in the Cholistan desert of Bahawalpur, on the Hakra, which is what the Ghaggar becomes once it crosses into Pakistan. It is one of the five largest Harappan sites and has barely been excavated. A city of that size this far into a desert, on a channel with no water in it, is the end of the argument the dashed line on this map is making.
On these journeys
Sources
Survey reports, Cholistan
Open Ganweriwala in the repository →