Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.95

c12.95

The whole area in which these coolie-lines stood is, in Wheeler’s words, ‘marshalled like a military cantonment and bespeaks authority’. In the areas excavated beyond the workmen’s quarters were orderly rows of circular working floors carefully built of baked brick, about 10 feet in diameter and originally containing at the centre a massive wooden mortar sunk in the ground, in which grain could be pounded to flour with long heavy pestles in the manner still employed in Bengal and Kashmir. The worn bricks near the centres of these primitive corn-milling devices showed where the bare-footed slaves had stood as they pounded the grain, and remains of wheat, barley and chaff were in fact found in some of the central hollows (Pl. 3). Behind these again was a great granary standing on a brick-built podium 150 feet wide and probably at least 200 feet long, with buttressed walls and divided by a central aisle, on each side of which were ranged the individual storage blocks raised on brick substructures above the damp ground, and each measuring 50 by 20 feet. Again, not far from the granary and working-platforms were metal-workers' furnaces, which once more emphasize the semi-industrialized nature of this quarter of Harappā.