Place · Harappan city · India
Rakhigarhi
The Harappan city in Hisar district, Haryana, possibly the largest Harappan settlement by area (over 350 hectares), excavated continuously since 1998 by Vasant Shinde and the Deccan College. Rakhigarhi flourished through all four Harappan phases from c.3000 to 1700 BCE. In 2019 the DNA from a mature-Harappan burial here — successfully extracted after multiple failed attempts in Vagad district — contributed the first genomic data for a Harappan individual, and became central to arguments about population history. The analysis showed no Steppe pastoralist ancestry, suggesting the Aryan steppe migration into the subcontinent post-dates the mature Harappan period.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
- Location
- 29.290, 76.110
Genetic findings from this site are actively debated and are regularly overstated in public argument in every direction.
Connections (3)
- Contemporary capital withKalibangan
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.
- AnalogueHarappa
Harappa was excavated first and gave the civilisation its name, having first been quarried to ballast a railway; Rakhigarhi may be larger and has a village on top of it. The difference in how much is known about each is a matter of what was dug when and by whom, not of what each place was, and that is true of this whole subject.
- River adjacencySaraswati
Rakhigarhi on the Drishadvatī–Ghaggar system is now reckoned the largest Harappan site of all, larger than Mohenjo-daro, spread across several mounds in Haryana. Its 2018 ancient-DNA result — no Steppe ancestry in the individual sampled — is argued over inside the same dispute as the river: what the relationship is between the people of these cities and the people of the hymns.
On these journeys
Sources
Rakhigarhi excavations; Shinde et al. 2019
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