Place · Harappan city · India
Kalibangan
The Harappan city near Bhadra river in Hanumangarh district, Rajasthan, excavated by B.B. Lal and B.K. Thapar from 1961. The pre-Harappan level yielded a ploughed field — the earliest known agricultural ploughing anywhere, dated c.2800 BCE — showing two directions of ploughing furrows preserved under later Harappan houses. The site also preserved a row of seven fire altars inside houses, whose interpretation as ritual hearths parallel to Vedic yajna has fuelled debate about continuity between Harappan and Vedic practice. Kalibangan's citadel-and-lower-town plan compressed into a smaller footprint distinguishes it from the larger Mohenjo-daro model.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — The Harappan settlement is established; the interpretation of its so-called fire altars as ritual remains disputed.
- Location
- 29.470, 74.130
Connections (4)
- Contemporary capital withRakhigarhi
Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan both sit on the Ghaggar-Hakra system that dominates the eastern Harappan zone, and both have yielded things nothing else has: Rakhigarhi possibly the largest settlement by area and an ancient genome that has become central and contested in arguments about Harappan ancestry, Kalibangan the earliest ploughed field known anywhere and a row of fire altars whose interpretation is still disputed.
- Site adjacencyBanawali
Kalibangan and Banawali are neighbouring towns on the dry Ghaggar bed with closely comparable sequences, and both are central to the argument about whether the eastern Harappan heartland was watered by a river that has since vanished. Sediment dating now suggests the Himalayan Sutlej and Yamuna had already left this channel before the cities were built, which would mean these towns sat on a seasonal monsoon-fed stream rather than a great river.
- Site adjacencyGhaggar–Hakra palaeochannel
Kalibangan and Banawali both sit on the dry Ghaggar bed, and the sediment cores taken near Kalibangan indicate the Himalayan Sutlej had left this channel long before the mature Harappan city was built. That makes their water monsoon-fed and seasonal, which changes what the abandonment of these eastern towns has to be explained by.
- River adjacencySaraswati
Kalibangan is a walled Harappan town on the left bank of the Ghaggar in Rajasthan, with the earliest ploughed field yet found in the subcontinent and a row of fire altars whose purpose is still argued over. It is the type case for the dry-river problem: a substantial town on a channel that now runs only in the monsoon and must have carried more when the town was lived in.
On these journeys
Sources
Kalibangan excavation reports, ASI
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