Place · post-Harappan settlement · Pakistan
Pirak
A small site on the Kachi plain near Sibi, excavated by the French mission under Jean-François Jarrige between 1968 and 1974, which matters out of all proportion to its size. Its levels run from about 1800 to 800 BCE — the period after the Harappan cities ended — and they carry the earliest firm evidence in the subcontinent for the domestic horse and the two-humped camel, together with rice and sorghum. A new agricultural and animal regime is visible arriving in one stratigraphy.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.444, 67.844
Worth knowing
Terracotta figurines of horses and riders from Pirak are among the oldest in the subcontinent, which puts the animal in Balochistan in the second millennium BCE and makes the site unavoidable in every argument about when horses arrived.
Connections (3)
- Succession in timeMehrgarh
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 timeMohenjo-daro
Pirak is the best answer the region offers to what followed the cities. Its levels start about 1800 BCE, as Mohenjo-daro's urban order is ending, and they do not show collapse so much as replacement: a new crop regime of rice and sorghum alongside the old wheat and barley, and the domestic horse and the Bactrian camel appearing together for the first time in the subcontinent's record. The scale is villages rather than cities, but the animals and the crops are new, which is a different story from decline.
- Site adjacencySibi
The Kachi plain around Sibi holds a remarkable density of the region's deep past within a few dozen kilometres: Mehrgarh from about 7000 BCE, Nausharo taking the sequence into the Harappan, and Pirak carrying it on from 1800 BCE with horses, camels and rice. Sibi itself is the historic market town of that plain and the foot of the Bolan. The same flat ground that gives the archaeologists their sequence gives the province its February livestock fair, and for the same reason: it is where the hills let go.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pirak”. J.-F. and C. Jarrige, Fouilles de Pirak (1979); Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan.
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