How archaeologists work

Detail

Sites, mounds and why the ground rises

• A site is any place with traces of past human life — tools, pots, bricks, bones, buildings.
• People live in one place for many years. They throw away rubbish, break houses, build new ones on top of the old.
• This debris piles up. The ground slowly rises into a mound (a raised heap of earth). Many Indian village names ending in -tila, -dheri or -daro are such mounds. Mohenjo-daro itself means "mound of the dead"; it was found in 1922 by R. D. Banerji, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and dug on a large scale under John Marshall [3].
• So the mound is not a hill. It is a stack of human time.

Layers and stratigraphy

• Each period of living leaves a layer. Layers differ from each other in:
• colour (ash grey, red burnt earth, dark rubbish),
• texture (loose sand, hard packed floor, brick rubble),

• artefacts inside (the pot types and tools change from layer to layer).

• Sterile layers: when a site is left empty for some years, a layer forms with no human objects in it. That gap tells us the place was abandoned and later re-settled.

• Stratigraphy = reading these layers at a dig. The rule is simple: the lowest layer is the oldest, the top layer is the newest, because earth piles upward.
• An object is dated by the layer it sits in. A pot found in layer 5 belongs to the cultural period of layer 5. This is relative dating — it tells us older or younger, not the exact year.
• ASI's own field training teaches exactly this: recording the context of excavated remains, drawing sections and plans, and using stratigraphy for three-dimensional recording and understanding site formation [2].
• Two ways to dig [2]:
• Vertical excavation — a deep, narrow trench. Goal: get the full time sequence of layers.

• Horizontal excavation — a wide area opened at one level. Goal: see the plan of houses, streets, drains at one moment in time.

• Modern Indian stratigraphic practice was sharpened by field training under R. E. M. Wheeler, which helped untangle hard layer problems at sites like Kalibangan [2].

Experimental archaeology

• Experimental archaeology = make a copy of an ancient tool today, then actually use it.
• Method: take the same stone, strike it the same way, then cut meat, scrape hide or chop wood with the copy.
• Two things are learnt:
• how the original was made (which blow, which angle, how long it took),

• how it was used — the wear marks on the copy are matched with the wear marks on the ancient tool.

• This turns a guess into a tested idea.

What survives and what does not

• Organic things rot in a hot, wet tropical climate — cloth, leather, wood, food, rope, most bone in acid soil.
• Hard things survive — stone, terracotta (baked clay), metal, some bone and ivory.
• So the past we dig up is lopsided: we get the pots, not the clothes; the beads, not the songs.
• What people throw away is what we find. Only broken or useless things were discarded.
• Intact valuable things reach us by accident — they were lost, or buried as a hoard (a store of valuables hidden in the ground and never collected).
• Exam point: finds are accidental, not typical. A gold hoard does not mean everyone had gold.

Classifying the finds

• Step 1 — by material: stone, clay/terracotta, metal, bone, ivory, shell, glass/faience.
• Step 2 — by function: is it a tool, an ornament, a household pot, or a ritual object?
• Function is the hard part. The object does not carry a label.

Four ways to work out what an object was for

• ① Present-day analogy — compare with a similar object still used today.
• At Mohenjo-daro, Ernest Mackay found saddle querns (a flat stone with a rubbing stone on top, for grinding grain).
• His Indian workmen called them "curry stones", because their own families used the same shape to grind spices. The living tool explained the dead one.
• Mackay's own large excavations at Mohenjo-daro ran 1927–1931 [3].

• Caution: analogy can mislead. Today's use need not be the ancient use.

• ② Context of the find — where exactly it lay matters as much as what it is.

• Same pot in a house = cooking; in a grave = offering for the dead; in a drain = rubbish; near a kiln = production waste.

• This is why careless digging destroys evidence: once the object is lifted without recording, its context is gone forever.

• ③ Indirect evidence — the thing itself is gone, so we read its shadow.

• Cloth rots, but traces of cotton stuck to metal objects survive, and sculpture shows how garments were draped. Together they tell us about clothing.

• ④ Frames of reference — a find means nothing until there is something to compare it with.

• The first Harappan seal found made no sense at all. Only when similar seals turned up in Mesopotamian contexts did scholars realise this was an unknown, old, literate urban civilisation.
• Seals later came in bulk: 388 unicorn seals alone came from Mackay's Mohenjo-daro work of 1927–31 [3].
• Marshall's public announcement of the discovery appeared in the Illustrated London News, with a set of seals published on 24 September 1924 — the moment the Indus civilisation entered world knowledge [3].

Reading society from objects

• Burials.
• Harappan burials are mostly simple pit burials, with some pots and a few ornaments. Differences between graves are small.
• Egyptian pyramids of the same broad age are packed with wealth for the dead king.

• Conclusion: the two societies handled rank and death very differently. Harappan burials do not show one huge gap between a king and everyone else.

• Utilitarian vs luxury. An object counts as a luxury when it ticks these boxes:

• made of rare or costly material,
• the material is not local — it was brought from far away,
• it needs complex technology to make — e.g. faience (a man-made glassy paste, ground sand shaped and fired to give a shiny blue-green finish; nothing like it occurs naturally),

• and it is found only in a few places, usually the large settlements.

• Finding a craft centre. A workshop is identified by five clues:

• raw material lying in a heap (unworked stone, shell, copper),
• tools of the craft (furnaces, drills, crucibles),
• unfinished pieces stopped halfway,
• rejects — pieces that broke or came out wrong,

• waste — the chips, flakes and cut-offs. Waste is the best indicator, because waste is heavy, worthless and never carried away. Finished goods travel; rubbish stays.

• (Site-level detail on Harappan craft centres like Chanhudaro and Nageshwar sits in the harappan-civilisation note.)

Limits of the method

• Archaeology gives things, not thoughts. It can show a fire altar but not the prayer said at it.
• Dating by layer is relative, so it is paired with scientific dating (radiocarbon) for absolute years.
• Excavation destroys the site. A layer, once dug, can never be dug again — hence ASI's stress on recording sections and plans before removal [2].

Prelims Hooks

• Mohenjo-daro was discovered in 1922 by R. D. Banerji of the ASI; large-scale digging was directed by John Marshall [3].
• Ernest Mackay excavated Mohenjo-daro between 1927 and 1931; 388 unicorn seals came from this work [3].
• Indus seals were made known to the wider public through the Illustrated London News of 24 September 1924 [3].
• Stratigraphy: the lowest layer is the oldest; objects are dated by the layer they are found in — a relative dating method.
• A sterile layer = a layer without artefacts, showing the site was abandoned for a time.
• Vertical excavation gives the time sequence; horizontal excavation gives the plan of a settlement at one level [2].
• Saddle querns at Mohenjo-daro were nicknamed "curry stones" by Mackay's workmen — a classic case of present-day analogy.
• Waste/debris is the best indicator of a craft centre, along with raw material, tools, unfinished pieces and rejects.
• Faience = an artificial glassy material made from ground sand, treated as a luxury item.
• Experimental archaeology = making and using replica tools to learn manufacture and use.
• Harappan burials are largely pit burials — contrast with wealth-filled Egyptian pyramids.

Mains Points

• Archaeological evidence is systematically biased, and the historian must correct for it. Organic goods rot in the tropics; only broken or lost items enter the ground. So the record over-represents stone, metal and terracotta, and under-represents cloth, wood, food and the poor. Any statement about "how people lived" must state this filter first.
• Context is the unit of meaning, not the object. The same pot means offering, cooking or rubbish depending on whether it came from a grave, a house floor or a drain. This is the strongest argument against treasure-hunting and unscientific digging — and the reason ASI training centres on recording sections, plans and three-dimensional context [2].
• Interpretation depends on a frame of reference. The first Harappan seal was unreadable until Mesopotamian parallels were known; knowledge advanced only when finds were compared across regions. This shows history-writing is cumulative and revisable, not a one-time discovery — useful in answers on historiography.
• Objects can answer social questions that texts cannot. Burial simplicity, the spread of luxury items like faience, and the location of craft waste let us argue about inequality, specialisation and trade for societies that left no readable literature — the core method for all pre-literate and proto-historic periods.