Place · Harappan outpost · India
Surkotada
The small fortified Harappan settlement in Kutch district, Gujarat, excavated by J.P. Joshi from 1972. The horse bones reported from the mature Harappan layers at Surkotada are among the most disputed finds in South Asian archaeology — if accepted, they would push domesticated-horse presence back a thousand years before the standard Indo-Aryan migration date. Zoological identification was reconfirmed by Sándor Bökönyi in 1991 but has been contested by Richard Meadow and others, who read the bones as donkey or wild ass. The town's three-fold division — citadel, lower town, residential annex — makes it one of the clearer small-scale Harappan plans.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
- Location
- 23.630, 70.840
The identification of horse remains here as from the Harappan period is contested; several zooarchaeologists outside the IVC-horse-advocacy tradition read them as khur (Asiatic wild ass) or later-period intrusions rather than domesticated horse, and the debate carries a heavy political load because of its implications for the Aryan-migration question.
Connections (1)
- Route adjacencyDaimabad
Surkotada in Kachchh and Daimabad on the Pravara are the southern reach of this system, and both are contested in the same way: Surkotada for horse bones, Daimabad for bronzes and pottery that look Harappan in a Jorwe village. In both cases a single class of find is being asked to carry a large argument, which is characteristic of the frontier evidence.
On these journeys
Sources
Surkotada excavation report
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