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ANCIENT RESILIENCE

Dramatic new discoveries illuminate the lost Indus civilization

This urban society in South Asia survived a weather apocalypse 4,000 years ago.
ANNALEE NEWITZ - FEB 6, 2017 4:33 PM
UTC
Rama's Arrow

The Indus city of Dholavira in western India had impressive water infrastructure, such as this deep reservoir. The Indus people needed a way to conserve their water
supply because rainy seasons were unpredictable. Each city came up with slightly different solutions to the water problem.

The Indus civilization is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. An urban society, it was made up of hundreds of cities and towns that stretched
across what are today northern India and Pakistan. Though its inhabitants left great art and elaborate water infrastructures behind, we know almost
nothing about the Indus people who lived between 3,000 and 1300 BCE. In fact, we still haven't even deciphered their written language.

But now, the results of a new long-term study of the northwestern Indus region have given us a new understanding of how this civilization functioned.
We've also gotten hints about how the civilization coped with dramatic climate change from ever-changing weather patterns.

An international team with the Land, Water, and Settlement project in northwest India studied Indus settlements in that region between 2007 and 2014,
looking at everything from water systems and plant remains to art and pottery. What they found has overturned conventional wisdom about who the
Indus people were and how they lived. Now they've published a treasure trove of new findings about local centers in the Indus civilization in Current
Anthropology.

Monsoon crisis
University of Cambridge archaeologist Cameron Petrie and his team found that settlements in the Indus Valley 5,000 years ago did not represent a
unified culture, though clearly they shared many things in common. Some symbols and pottery styles are found in hundreds of settlements, but many
were not. And when it came to farming and water management practices, each Indus settlement seemed to have its own ways of doing things.

Crops varied widely from place, though rice and millet were staples. Even growing seasons varied, with some settlements preferring winter crops and
others preferring summer. Still others seemed to prefer a mix of both. The reason for this wide variation had a lot to do with access to water. The Indus
region is at an environmental crossroads where monsoon rainfall varies dramatically from place to place.

Indus cities and towns, even ones that were essentially neighbors, adapted to very different patterns of rainy and dry seasons. Some used monsoon
rains to water crops, others waited for rain-swollen local rivers to flood fields, while still others built reservoirs to maintain a water supply year-round.
The biggest Indus cities, Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, are famous for their sophisticated waterworks, far more advanced than those of their trade
partners in the great cities of Mesopotamia. Though other civilizations of the same era left behind monumental ziggurats and pyramids, the Indus left
reservoirs and fountains.
 Usman Ghani

Enlarge / Ruins of Mohenjo-daro, one of the biggest cities of the Indus civilization. It had impressive
public fountains, baths, and plumbing. Its water infrastructure was far more advanced than other
civilizations in nearby Mesopotamia.

Then, at the height of Indus urbanization, when the region's cities were growing the largest they had ever been, climate disaster struck. The life-giving
monsoons weakened starting in roughly 2200 BCE. Drought crept into some regions, while others were relatively unaffected. And yet the Indus
settlements survived for centuries afterward. Writing in Current Anthropology, the researchers say this is why the story of the Indus region "provides a
unique opportunity to understand how an ancient society coped with both diverse and varied ecologies as well as change in the fundamental and
underlying environmental parameters."

Studying the Indus civilization might give us hints about what it takes for cities to make it through a period of dire climate change.

Mobility and diversity

One of the intriguing discoveries that's come out of the Land, Water, and Settlement project is that the Indus cultures seem to have been uniquely
qualified to deal with a climate crisis. Even before the monsoon rains slackened, each Indus settlement was used to adapting quickly to new weather
patterns. At the very least, they dealt with a season of floods and a season of drought every year. Beyond that, rainfall could also vary a lot over longer
periods.

Preliminary evidence suggests that many settlements may have moved around quite a bit to follow farm-friendly wet weather. The researchers suggest
that when we look at the hundreds of settlements left behind by the Indus peoples, we have to consider the possibility that only 5-10 percent of them
were occupied at any given time. Maybe these countless cities are the remains of just a few groups setting up camp in new areas every generation. We
have strong evidence that Indus population centers moved from west to east over a period of roughly 1,500 years, until finally people abandoned their
cities entirely and returned to a rural way of life.
 Current Anthropology

Enlarge / Here you can see distribution of urban-phase Indus settlements (A) and post-urban-phase
Indus settlements (B) in northwest India and their relationship to mean annual rainfall (19002008).
It's clear that sites moved eastward over time, possibly to capture more rain as the monsoons
weakened to the state they're in today. Major Indus sites and sites investigated by the Land, Water
and Settlement project are shown in white.

Indus people weren't just changing their locations all the time. They also changed what they ate. It seems that they planted new kinds of crops,
depending on what the environment could support. Winter crops like rabi-wheat, barley, pea, lentil, and chickpea could be swapped out for summer
crops like kharif-millet, rice, and tropical pulses. Often, Petrie and his team would find a mix of winter and summer crops, as if people were
experimenting to find out what grew best and when.

The researchers write:

Such an environment may have required settled populations to be relatively mobile in order to survive a constantly shifting hydrology, and
there may have been high population mobility between settlement locales. Individual families or kin groups potentially spread their members
between multiple settlements, and individuals or groups might have moved between settlements to access available water in times of shortage
or stress.

Panarchy
What's fascinating is that ecological diversity in the Indus valley seems to be echoed by a strong cultural diversity among the people of the Indus
civilization. Anthropologists sometimes call this phenomenon "panarchy" to describe the interaction between environment and social structure.

Indus cities and villages produced their own unique farming practices as well as unique styles of art. Some of the researchers found "region-specific
styles of pottery" in villages, unlike pottery found anywhere else, intermingled with "characteristically Indus material" like bangles and blue beads, which
are found throughout the Indus region. This suggests strong local identities supplemented a broader Indus culture. We know that migration between
villages and cities was common, so it's likely that people in the Indus valley thought of themselves as part of an overarching civilization. But evidence
strongly suggests it was a multicultural society, meaning that there were a lot of cultural differences at the local level, too.
 Here you can see characteristically Indus beads and fragments of bangles found at local northwestern sites Masudpur I and VII. These are examples of mainstream Indus
art. Current Anthropology

Here is a fascinating collection of local pottery designs from Masudpur I and VII, found mingled with more mainstream Indus designs characteristic of the big city of
Harappa. Current Anthropology

It was probably this multicultural aspect of Indus life that helped people survive climate change. Rather than depending on one kind of water
management system or a few staple crops, the civilization was built around diverse and redundant practices. As the researchers put it, "Indus
populations in some regions were well adapted to living in diverse and changeable ecological and environmental conditions and were thus well placed
to make sustainable and resilient decisions in the face of environmental change." The more centralized and homogenous the culture, the more fragile it
is when dealing with environmental shifts. Having many strategies and many cultures allowed the Indus civilization to react nimbly, adapting fast to
environments that were literally transforming before their eyes.

Current Anthropology, 2017. DOI: 10.1086/690112

ARS SCIENCE VIDEO >

Incredible discovery places
humans in California
130,000 years ago
 ANNALEE NEWITZ
Annalee Newitz is the Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. She is the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, and her first novel, Autonomous
out in September 2017.

EMAIL annalee.newitz@arstechnica.com // TWITTER @annaleen

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