Place · protohistoric cemetery horizon · Pakistan
The Gandhara grave culture
Between roughly 1700 and 800 BCE the valleys of Swat, Dir and Chitral buried their dead in stone-lined graves with a consistent kit: burnished grey ware, terracotta figurines, copper pins, and horse gear. The cemeteries at Katelai, Loebanr, Timargarha and beneath Butkara were dug from the 1950s onward, mostly by the Italian mission, and they are the only substantial body of evidence for the north-west between the Harappan collapse and the historic period.
- Function
- Burial and funerary
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.750, 72.300
Worth knowing
The graves were long read as the archaeological signature of Indo-Aryan speakers arriving through these valleys; that identification is now treated cautiously, because a burial rite and a language do not have to travel together.
The equation of this horizon with Indo-Aryan migration was standard for decades and is no longer accepted as established; the material sequence itself is secure.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyButkara & Swat valley
The cemeteries came first. Beneath and around the Buddhist sacred area at Butkara, and at Katelai, Loebanr and Timargarha, lie the stone-lined graves of the Gandhara grave culture, roughly 1700 to 800 BCE — burnished grey ware, copper pins, terracotta figurines, horse gear. The Italian mission dug both, which means the same excavations that established Gandharan stupa chronology also produced the only substantial body of evidence for the north-west in the millennium before the historic period.
- AnalogueBurzahom
The two northern protohistoric horizons, in Swat and in Kashmir, and both were read as migrations before they were read as sites. Burzahom on the Kashmir Karewa has pit dwellings, polished stone tools, bone points and dog and human burials from about 3000 BCE; the Swat graves have stone-lined cists with grey ware and horse gear from about 1700. Each was offered at some point as the archaeological signature of incoming Indo-Aryan speakers, and in both cases the material sequence has outlasted the identification.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gandhara grave culture”. C. Silvi Antonini and G. Stacul, The Proto-historic Graveyards of Swāt (1972); Massimo Vidale and Luca Olivieri on the revised reading.
Open The Gandhara grave culture in the repository →