A visit of Rakhigarhi | Seema kasual

The archaeological site of Rakhigarhi is one of the oldest and largest cities of the subcontinent’s earliest known Bronze Age urban culture—the Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization—located in the Hissar district of Haryana, approximately 150 km from our campus. This site, protected by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), is currently under excavation by the Institute of Archaeology, New Delhi. Rakhigarhi constitutes one of the only two cities of the Harappan Era (6th millennium–1900 BC) situated within India’s current political boundary, the other being Dholavira in Gujarat. The exploration around this site has clearly identified seven archaeological mounds spread over an area of approximately 350 ha. However, recently, archaeologist Professor Vasant Shinde has argued that the site of Rakhigarhi is comprised of 11 mounds, which would thus make it the largest known Harappan site. Rakhigarhi primarily yields evidence of occupation during the Early and Mature Harappan periods with the site being completely abandoned during the Late Harappan period, and people who had lived at this site for thousands of years moving away to a new location, which remains unidentified. This means that the large mounds that are currently visible at Rakhigarhi were formed in the course of 700 or 800 years of Mature Harappan occupation. Rakhigarhi is also well-known as the site which has yielded the only DNA evidence from the Harappan era