Place · Neolithic settlement · Pakistan
Mehrgarh
The Neolithic settlement at Mehrgarh in Kachi district, Baluchistan, Pakistan, excavated by Jean-François Jarrige's French mission from 1974. Mehrgarh is the oldest known Neolithic site in the subcontinent, with continuous occupation from c.7000 to c.2600 BCE — covering the full transition from pre-agricultural hunting-gathering to the pre-urban Harappan tradition. The lowest level yielded wheat and barley cultivation, cattle and goat herding, cotton (the earliest known in the world), and dentistry — drilled teeth c.5500 BCE, the earliest evidence of dental practice anywhere. The site documents the deep root of everything Harappan and is the clearest Indian-Pakistani example of the Neolithic Revolution.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.380, 67.620
Connections (6)
- PrecursorKot Diji
Mehrgarh on the Kachi plain has a sequence running from the seventh millennium BCE — wheat and barley farming, herded goats, cotton, and teeth drilled with bow-drills in what is the earliest dentistry known anywhere. That sequence runs up into the Kot Dijian horizon of the fourth and early third millennia, which is the pre-urban phase out of which the mature Harappan cities emerged. Nothing else in South Asia gives so long an unbroken village record.
- Route adjacencyBolan Pass
Mehrgarh sits at the mouth of the Bolan pass, and that position is the whole explanation of it: the domesticated wheat, barley, sheep, goat and cattle in its lowest levels have their nearest parallels in west Asia, and this is the gap they came through. Cotton, dentistry and copper smelting all appear here before any Indus city exists.
- AnalogueLahuradewa
Mehrgarh has wheat and barley from the seventh millennium BCE at the mouth of the Bolan pass; Lahuradewa has rice, claimed from about the same period, twelve hundred kilometres east in the Ganges plain. If both stand, the subcontinent had two independent agricultural beginnings on different crops, and the Ganges valley was not a frontier waiting to be settled from the west.
- Succession in timeSohr Damb, Nal
Mehrgarh on the Kachi plain and Sohr Damb at Nal in the Khuzdar hills carry the long Balochistan sequence between them. Mehrgarh runs from about 7000 BCE and shows farming, herding and the first potting in the region; Nal begins around 3800 BCE, as Mehrgarh is ending, with a ceramic tradition of far greater technical ambition. Read together they cover roughly five thousand years of the uplands west of the Indus without a serious gap, which no single site in the valley itself can do.
- Succession in timePirak
Both sites sit on the Kachi plain near Sibi, twenty-odd kilometres apart, and the same French mission under Jean-François Jarrige dug them. Mehrgarh gives the region its beginning — wheat, barley, goats, the earliest pottery. Pirak gives it the sequel nobody expected: from about 1800 BCE, after the Harappan cities had ended, the same plain shows horses and two-humped camels with rice and sorghum. One mission therefore excavated both the opening and the reorganisation of agriculture in Balochistan, on one plain.
- Succession in timeNausharo
Six kilometres apart and dug by the same man, these two sites carry the longest continuous record in the region. Mehrgarh runs from roughly 7000 BCE through farming, herding, the first pottery and the first cotton. Nausharo picks up in the late fourth millennium and runs straight into a Mature Harappan town, with the brick sizes, weights and ceramics changing over in stratified order. Jean-François Jarrige excavated both, which is why the join between the Balochistan neolithic and Indus urbanism can be read at all.
On these journeys
Sources
Mehrgarh excavation reports, Jarrige et al.
Open Mehrgarh in the repository →