Burzahom Near Srinagar Gave the ASI Neolithic Pit Dwellings Up to 3.96 Metres Deep, Wheat, Barley and Lentil, Burials With Dogs and an Engraved Hunting Scene, in ASI Excavations From 1960 to 1971

Burzahom, a mound on a raised terrace of old lake sediment about 16 km north-east of Srinagar, gave the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) a village of Stone Age farmers who lived in pits cut into the ground. The deepest pit measures 3.96 m. T. N. Khazanchi of the ASI dug the site from 1960 to 1971, and the survey’s report on the work, written later by R. S. Fonia from Khazanchi’s notes, calls it the type site of the Northern Neolithic, the name given to the Neolithic cultures of Kashmir and the neighbouring Himalayan valleys.

The report divides the mound into four periods: a Neolithic phase without pottery, a Neolithic phase with pottery, a Megalithic phase and an Early Historical one. Its calibrated radiocarbon dates start the first settlers at about 3000 BCE. In the layers came wheat, barley and lentil, bone harpoons and needles, a pot of 950 beads, burials with dogs under the house floors and a stone slab engraved with a hunt.

A karewa, a birch name and a late start

Kashmiri archaeology calls the raised, flat-topped terraces of the valley karewas, from the lake sediment that built them. Burzahom stands on one, the Yendrahom karewa, which Fonia’s report puts about 16 km from Srinagar and the first season’s review about 24 km. The report says the name means the place of birch, and the dig did turn up burnt birch.

The site was found in 1935 by Helmut De Terra and T. T. Paterson of the Yale-Cambridge expedition, who were studying the valley’s ice ages. Their trial trenches showed three layers of occupation, which the ASI report credits with showing that more work was worth doing. Real excavation waited until the state’s archaeology department merged with the ASI in 1959. The job went to Khazanchi in 1960, and the report’s preface credits him with the findings and calls Burzahom the first habitation site of its kind in Jammu and Kashmir to be dug at scale.

Across the main section the diggers recorded 12 layers and about 4.20 m of deposit. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay dated eight charcoal samples: two from the first two phases, five from the later Neolithic and one from the Megalithic. The Tata Institute’s 1965 date list, which carries four of them, notes that collecting charcoal at Burzahom “presented special problems”.

Houses dug 3.96 metres down

The first settlers, whose phase the report calls Period I, cut circular and oval pits into hard yellow loess, a windblown silt, using long stone celts, which are polished axe-like tools. The UNESCO tentative-list dossier says the cut marks of the blades can still be traced. The largest pit measured 2.74 m across at the top, 4.57 m across the floor and 3.96 m deep, according to the report. Lone’s summary on Sahapedia, citing the 1961 to 1962 season review, gives 2.78 m, 4.57 m and 3.69 m, and the UNESCO dossier gives a depth of 3.95 m. The pits were narrow at the mouth and wide at the base, with walls plastered with mud. Steps in the side led down part of the way, and the report reads that as a sign of ladders for the rest.

Post holes round the mouths point to a roof, and charred reeds, hay and birch bark were found in the pits. The report says birch is an effective roofing material against snow. Stone hearths and small storage pits at ground level beside the pits suggest to the report that people also lived above ground in summer. The UNESCO tentative-list dossier makes the same reading and adds that some shallower pits, about 91 cm deep, were probably stores or warm-season shelters.

The diggers exposed about 45 square or rectangular pit chambers and 37 circular pits. A rectangular one, found in the 1966 to 1967 season, measured 6.40 m by 7.00 m, with a hearth near the centre and a shallow drain running round its edge. In Period IIA the report sees a plan: square chambers toward the middle of the settlement and circular pits on the edge, which it reads as the layout of a clan-type kin group.

Not every archaeologist reads the pits as homes. Lone writes on Sahapedia that most scholars still call them dwellings, then sets out the other view, argued by researchers who compared them with pit sites of Iron Age Britain: that they were storage pits, and that people moved to warmer ground in winter.

Later, in Period II, people moved above ground. The pits were filled and rammed with red ochre, a red earth pigment, and the houses became mud platforms and mud-brick structures with post holes. One floor held a row of 45 post holes in a space of 3.96 m by 1.21 m, which the report reads as a roofed community building.

Wheat, barley, lentil and a pit of deer bones

The botanist G. M. Buth of Kashmir University and R. N. Kaw of the ASI examined 24 soil samples from Periods I and II. The report says they found wheat, barley and lentil, some of them wild forms and some cultivated. The wheats were Triticum compactum and Triticum sphaerococcum, the barley Hordeum vulgare and the lentil Lens culinaris. Stone querns for grinding grain came from the same layers. R. K. Pant’s study of wear marks on the stone tools led him to read the axes as wood-cutters, the adzes as digging tools and the flake knives as reaping blades. Rice and millet appear only in the Megalithic period, from about 1400 BCE on the report’s reading of other researchers.

Early farmers still hunted. The animal bones include deer, Kashmir stag, ibex, bear, wolf, nilgai and the wild sheep called urial, and domestic cattle, sheep, goat, dog and pig. From Period IIA, the report finds, domestic bones rise as a share of the total and wild ones fall. It also notes that gaur, a wild ox, was recorded in Kashmir for the first time at Burzahom and is now extinct there. In the second phase, a wide, deep pit with a charred lining held many animal bones, mostly deer, and the 1960 to 1961 review read it as a possible communal hearth.

Bone supplied much of the toolkit. The UNESCO dossier lists harpoons, needles with and without eyes, awls for stitching skins, spear points, arrowheads and scrapers for treating hides among the finds, and it names the introduction and spread of lentil in north-western India as one of the site’s points of interest.

A later study at another site adds direct dates. Pokharia and colleagues report from Kanispur, in Baramulla district, that Ceramic Neolithic deposits dated to 2700 to 2000 BCE held barley, wheats, lentil, field pea and grass pea. They describe it as possibly the earliest cultivation in the valley and publish what they call the oldest directly dated wheat and barley in Kashmir.

A painted pot, 950 beads and the Harappan neighbours

In Period IIB the diggers found a wheel-made vase of orange-slipped ware with a horned animal painted in black on its shoulder, a wild goat with long horns and hanging ears. The report says its shape and design resemble the Kot Diji ware of the early Harappan culture and that it was probably brought from Sarai Khola, a site on the Potwar plateau of what is now Pakistan. The 1964 to 1965 review recorded two wheel-made, black-painted red-ware pots from Phase II, one holding 950 beads of carnelian and agate.

Copper came with them: barbed arrowheads, a ring and a bangle in Period II. The report reads these as signs of contact with early Harappan or Harappan sites, and it says the double-holed harvesting knives point to contact with China. It adds that, on A. K. Sharma’s measurements, Burzahom skulls are closer to mature Harappan skulls from Cemetery R 37 at Harappa. Lone’s Sahapedia summary records that Thapar saw the copper pieces as intrusive, while Bandey argued they were made locally. The painted pot is the clearer case for an import.

Burials with dogs under the floor

The report counts ten human burials, five male, three female, one juvenile and one child: seven from Period II and three from the Megalithic Period III. All lay below house floors, 1.25 m to 3.25 m down, in circular pits that were often lime-plastered. In Period II the bones were coloured with red ochre. Grave goods were few: five miniature pots with one skeleton, beads, a soapstone pendant and a stone bowl.

The animal burials number eleven. Dogs, wolves, ibex, goat and sheep were laid in their own pits or with people. A dog’s skull lay in one human grave, ibex skull fragments and an antler in another, and one pit held five wild dogs and antlers, found in the 1962 to 1963 season. The report says this was the first time in the Indian subcontinent that so many systematic burials of animals had been found and studied. It cites Allchin on the upper Amur region of eastern Asia, where dogs were until recently buried with their owners.

One skeleton, number 7, has a skull with six complete circular holes on the left side, 8 to 13 mm across, and five shallow circular depressions. The season review of 1962 to 1963 counted seven finished and four unfinished holes. Basu and Pal concluded in 1980 that the holes were made after death, for ritual and not as surgery, and the report adds that this probably happened while the bones lay exposed for the red ochre. Allchin in 1968 and Sankhyan and Weber in 2001 argued that the person was alive when they were cut. A review of trepanation (cutting holes in the skull) dates the skull to about 2350 to 2050 BCE and describes the person as a woman aged 26 to 30. The report lists three other Indian cases of cranial perforation, at the Harappan sites of Lothal in Gujarat and Kalibangan in Rajasthan, and at Maski in Karnataka.

The slab with a hunt on it

The 1964 to 1965 review calls a slab engraved with a hunting scene an outstanding find. The slab is about 70 cm wide, and the engraved area measures 48 cm by 27 cm. The report describes a stag speared from behind and shot with an arrow from the front. Above it are a dog and two sun symbols. The slab had been laid face down as part of a rectangular structure of slabs, with the engraved side hidden.

The report says one hunter appears to be a woman and notes controversy over whether the figures are male or female. For the two suns it offers a reading from Joseph Campbell’s work on hunting rites, in which one sun marks the day of the hunt and the other the day of the return. Pande, quoted by Lone, describes the symbols as two concentric circles with 16 rays each.

The report calls the slab the first indubitable example of Neolithic art in India, since it comes from a stratified layer, while other Indian examples have been dated differently by scholars. For that other argument, see the article on the dating of Bhimbetka’s rock paintings. A second slab, broken, carries a design that Pande read as a hut with a thatched roof.

Stones, then bricks

Period III brought menhirs, which are tall standing stones. The 1960 to 1961 review found six in position, five upright and one flat, forming a rough semicircle, and judged that they were set up toward the end of the Neolithic. Lone’s page speaks of 11 megaliths on the mound. The report says the Megalithic people also worked iron and copper, used a fast wheel and built rubble walls. Period IV has mud-brick structures and rubble walls over the Megalithic ones, with wheel-made red ware, iron nails and arrowheads, and the report dates it to about the third or fourth century CE.

Dates, and where they split

The report’s chronology section assigns Period I to 3000 to 2850 BCE, IIA to 2850 to 2550, IIB to 2550 to 1700 and the Megalithic to 1500 to 1000 BCE. Its conclusion gives the Megalithic as 1700 to 1000 BCE, and elsewhere it places the slab and the painted pot in the second millennium BCE. The dossier submitted to UNESCO says 3000 to 1000 BCE for Periods I to III. The 1965 Tata Institute list said the Neolithic culture extended beyond the second millennium BCE. Every calibrated figure rests on a handful of charcoal samples from the 1960s.

The first period also took time to establish. The 1960 to 1961 season found potsherds in the pits, and the report says the aceramic level was confirmed later, by R. K. Pant in 1980 at other Kashmir sites and by the ASI’s Gufkral dig of 1981 to 1982. It also notes that 96 per cent of the circular pits had no pottery.

What the report and the dossier say now

The report’s preface says no proper account of the Burzahom excavation was published for four decades. It adds that Burzahom drew in surveys across the Kashmir valley and the Swat valley, and at Gumla and Mehrgarh in Pakistan and Karuo in the Tibetan plateau. About four dozen Neolithic sites are known in the valley. The preface also says that little prehistoric research has been done there since the late 1990s because of conflict and unrest, and the report closes by proposing a return to Burzahom or Gufkral with modern methods such as pollen, phytolith and food-residue analysis.

India’s Permanent Delegation to UNESCO submitted the Neolithic Settlement of Burzahom to the tentative list on 15 April 2014, under criteria (ii), (iii) and (v). The dossier says the ASI and the state’s archaeology department manage the property under the 1958 Act on ancient monuments, as amended in 2010, and the ASI’s list of centrally protected monuments carries Burzahom in Srinagar district. The tentative-list page was still live when checked on 5 November 2026.