The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c13.8

c13.8

It must suffice here to remark upon two other sites which have produced Harappan material and are in other respects notable. On the west bank of the Indus, 80 miles south of Mohenjo-daro and 20 miles west of Chanhu-daro, two mounds adjoining the village of Amrī were briefly examined in 1929.¹ Two trenches in the smaller (western) mound yielded results out of all proportion to their extent, and well illustrate the possibilities of such trenching when wisely conducted. Both trenches showed the stone foundations of buildings of undetermined extent, one including a range of small rooms; but, more immediately important, two clearly distinguished occupations were revealed and were assignable to two quite different cultures. The upper and later, to which the foundations appear to have belonged, was fully developed Harappan. The lower stratum, “a darker soil unlike that of the upper levels”, was marked by a ceramic totally different in fabric and decoration. Like the Harappan it is wheel-made, but it is notably thin and porous, its paste and ground are of a buff, cream or pink colour, and the colour-decoration seems often to have been applied after firing. Like the related pottery of Nal in southern Baluchistan, the decoration tends to be polychrome, a reddish band being introduced amongst the black or chocolate decoration. The latter is all geometrical and is characterized by rows of lozenges, either solid or hatched, chevrons, rectangles within rectangles, rows of “sigmas”, pendant loops, and panels of chequer-pattern. Naturalistic Harappan motifs such as the pipal, and even highly stylized bulls, ibex or fish such as occasionally occur on the Nal pottery, are entirely absent. The “Amrī ware”, as it has been called, has roots in the Baluch hills but is essentially characteristic of the plain which lies between them and the Indus. After more than twenty years, it is still the only well-defined ceramic which has been shown on clear stratigraphical evidence to precede the Harappan.