Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.182

c12.182

Until recently little was known of the burials of the Harappā people. It is normal in the ancient oriental cities to find, even in the heart of the occupied areas, burials made among or under the houses and contemporary with the living inhabitants, but despite the claims of Marshall and those who followed him I do not feel that any true burials contemporary with the Harappā civilization were found within the city precincts on either of the two main sites. It is again an instance of the Indian individualism, and perhaps another example of strict urban bye-laws. At Mohenjo-daro a series of skeletons were found, of assorted ages, sexes and anthropological types, individually or in groups of up to fourteen persons, and in all instances the bodies lay in disorder and other circumstances suggested a violent or accidental death, and in no sense a deliberate burial deposit. At Harappā a curious, tightly-packed mass of human skulls and a few other bones, representing over twenty people, was found on the outskirts of the city: the deposit is unexplained, but is hardly a normal burial. Fragmentary bones from another site in this city were claimed as a ‘fractional’ burial, but may be modern; and a definite fractional burial at Mohenjo-daro was associated with a pottery vessel of a type now known to belong to a phase following the Harappā civilization. The groups of broken pots cited by Marshall as allied to fractional burial groups seem to have no claim to any funerary significance whatever.