Kalibangan in Rajasthan Gave the ASI a Ploughed Field With Furrows Cut at Right Angles, a Walled Harappan Citadel and Lower Town, and Fire Altars, in Nine Digging Seasons From 1960 to 1969

Kalibangan, a Harappan site on the left bank of the dry Ghaggar river in Hanumangarh district, Rajasthan, gave the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) a ploughed field in its ninth digging season, 1968 to 1969. The ASI’s review of that season describes a grid of furrow marks under the Harappan occupation layers, with the east-west rows about 30 cm apart on average and the north-south rows 1.80 m apart. The review calls it “perhaps the earliest ploughed agricultural field”.

The dig that found it ran for nine seasons from 1960 to 1969 under B. B. Lal and B. K. Thapar. It uncovered two cultures on one site, a pre-Harappan village and, above it, a walled Harappan town with a citadel, a lower town of streets and house blocks, and hearths that the excavators read as fire altars. The ASI’s 2020 report puts the mature Harappan phase at about 2600 to 1900 BCE.

A grid of furrows under the town

The furrows run roughly along the cardinal directions. The 1968 to 1969 review says the pattern closely resembles the one used around the village today and, on that analogy, may point to two kinds of grain sown, one in each set of furrows. Jagat Pati Joshi, who wrote the 2020 report’s chapter on subsistence, reads the same marks as mixed cropping and compares them with double cropping in Rajasthan’s winter season.

The same chapter lists the grains the townspeople grew: wheat, barley, pea and chickpea. It takes a large number of cattle bones from the site to mean that bullocks pulled the plough. Madhu Bala, who wrote the report’s chapter on terracotta objects, describes hand-modelled toy ploughs from Kalibangan and reads them as showing the shape of a real Harappan ploughshare.

The season review gives no calendar date for the field. It says only that Harappan layers cover it. The 2020 report places the start of the Harappan town at about 2600 BCE, and Live History India, a history magazine, dates the field to about 2700 BCE. A footnote in the 2020 report cites an article by Lal in the journal Puratattva for the description “perhaps the earliest ploughed field so far excavated anywhere in the world”. Both the review and Lal use the word perhaps.

Who found the mound, and who dug it

Kalibangan means “black bangles”, Live History India says, for the bangle fragments scattered over the surface. Accounts of its first notice differ. The Tata Institute’s 1964 radiocarbon list says Sir Aurel Stein discovered the site and A. Ghosh identified it as Harappan. Live History India credits the Italian scholar Luigi Pio Tessitori with finding it in 1917. Ghosh’s own field notes, printed as an appendix to the ASI’s 2020 report, refer to earlier collecting by both men in the area.

Ghosh explored the dried valleys of the Ghaggar and the Drishadvati in 1950 to 1951. He counted more than 25 mounds of the Harappan culture, from the Pakistan border to a point midway between Hanumangarh and Suratgarh in the valley he called the Sarasvati, and a few more in the Drishadvati valley. He wrote that “the colossal mound of Kalibanga stands, as it were, as the easternmost outpost of this great culture”. He also noted that the Harappan sites then known stretched from Baluchistan to the eastern edge of Bikaner, a distance he put at more than 700 miles.

Digging began in 1960 to 1961 as a training exercise for the ASI’s School of Archaeology under Lal. The first report found two mounds, the larger to the east and the smaller to the west, rising to 12 m above the surrounding ground and covering a quarter of a square kilometre. Thapar directed the next season, and the two men directed jointly after that. The report on the early settlement was published in 2003, and the report on the mature town in 2020.

Two cultures on one mound

The ASI numbered the mounds KLB-1 (the smaller, western one), KLB-2 (the larger, eastern one) and KLB-3 (a small mound east of the larger). On KLB-1 the lowest layers, about 1.60 m deep on average, belonged to the earlier culture. The 1962 to 1963 review counts five structural phases there. The houses were of mud-brick, with bricks 30 by 20 by 10 cm. The pottery was wheel-made and painted in black on red, in six fabrics the ASI labelled A to F. Ovens stood both above and below ground in one room. Finds included beads of steatite, shell, carnelian and copper, shell bangles and a copper celt (an axe-like tool).

At about that height the mound seems to have been left for a time. The review wondered, with a question mark, whether an earthquake was the cause, and it recorded a sandy layer sealing displaced, faulted deposits. It added that further evidence was needed. The mound was soon reoccupied, perhaps when the Harappans arrived, and its character changed to mud-brick platforms with buildings raised on them.

Dating has moved a long way since the first seasons. The 1963 to 1964 review, working from early radiocarbon results, said the Harappan town lasted only about three hundred years and ended at the start of the second millennium BCE. The Tata Institute’s 1964 list gave a bracket of about 2300 to 1750 BC for Kalibangan and other Harappan sites, on raw dates that used the 5568-year half-life. The 2020 report cites newer radiocarbon dates corrected with the MASCA table, a conversion from raw radiocarbon ages to calendar years, and gives about 2600 to 1900 BCE for the mature phase.

A citadel and a lower town, both walled

By the end of its first season the ASI suspected that the smaller mound was a citadel, a raised and defended area like those at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Later seasons confirmed a fortification wall. On the southern side it ran for more than 100 m with rectangular salients (projecting bastions) and a corner tower, and it was 6.50 to 7 m thick in its earlier phase and 9 to 11 m in its later one. Four mud-brick platforms stood inside, aligned to the cardinal directions, with passages between them. One east-west platform measured 60 m long, and the passage beside it was 10 m wide.

The lower town on KLB-2 had a chessboard plan. The 1962 to 1963 review recorded a main street more than 7 m wide, a side street 5 m wide and lanes 1.50 m wide, with blocks of houses built around courtyards. Houses used mud-brick of 30 by 15 by 7.5 cm, and baked brick went only into drains and wells. One house had a well and a stairway with four surviving steps leading to the roof or an upper floor. Both brick sizes used on the site, this one and the larger 40 by 20 by 10 cm, keep a ratio of 4 to 2 to 1.

The lower town had its own wall. The 1967 to 1968 season exposed more than 150 m of it on the west, 3 to 3.9 m thick, with a gateway 3.7 m wide and a room beside it that looks like a guard room. The next season traced more than 110 m on the north, between 4 and 9.10 m thick, and found four north-south streets in the northern half, two of them meeting at a gateway in the north-west corner. The 1967 to 1968 review records that the wall began with the earliest Harappan settlement.

Small finds tie the town to the wider Harappan world: seals and sealings, weights, and pottery with Indus script or graffiti. A storage jar from a citadel house carried an inscription in Harappan characters. Readers who want another Harappan town with walls and gates can turn to our piece on Dholavira in Gujarat, and the ASI’s work at Lothal is covered separately.

The fire altars

The ASI’s own reports are careful about the label fire altar. In the lower town the 1962 to 1963 review found oval or rectangular fire-places in houses at different levels. Each began as a shallow pit in which a fire was lit, with a cylindrical or rectangular block fixed at the centre, and terracotta cakes appear to have been used. The review said their exact function remained unresolved.

On the citadel the same review recorded rectangular fire-places in a row inside one room. The 1966 to 1967 season found a well tied to a fire altar on top of one platform, and, on the same platform, a brick-lined pit holding animal bones, particularly of cattle and deer. In 1968 to 1969 the diggers opened KLB-3, a mound about 70 by 50 m. It held a mud-brick structure enclosing fire altars with the usual contents of cakes, ash and cylindrical blocks, a 12 m length of mud-brick wall 1.65 m thick, and no houses. The review said this may suggest use for religious purposes only, and that its place outside the city to the east might matter.

The 2020 report goes further. Joshi and the IIT Kanpur metallurgist Balasubramaniam, in their chapter on measuring instruments, count seven fire altars on the citadel mound. Madhu Bala’s chapter on terracotta objects suggests that a room on KLB-3 could have been a fire temple. She describes one terracotta cake incised with a horned figure on one face and a goat being carried on the other, probably for sacrifice in her reading. She also notes that round and triangular cakes could have served as heat retainers in the hearths, so the cakes do not settle the question of ritual on their own.

The river and the end of the town

The 1960 to 1961 review described the Ghaggar at Kalibangan as usually dry but occasionally flooded by water released from a dam upstream at Sirsa, and it called the river the ancient Sarasvati. In 1967 to 1968 the ASI drilled four borings 300 m apart in the river bed to a depth of 40 m, with the Geological Survey of India and a hydrologist, R. L. Raikes, to trace the course of the river. The review says the samples were under examination.

A 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Liviu Giosan and colleagues reconstructed the history of the rivers across the whole Harappan region. It found that rivers were active in the Ghaggar-Hakra valley during the urban Harappan phase, which it dates to about 4,500 to 3,900 years ago, and that the valley is dry or seasonal now. It concluded that only rivers fed by the monsoon, and no large glacier-fed river, flowed there in the Holocene, the period since the last ice age. Some scholars identify the Ghaggar-Hakra with the Sarasvati, the authors note, and they reject a glacier-fed source for it. They report that monsoon rainfall fell from about 5,000 years ago and that deurbanization followed after about 3,900 years ago. The paper does not study Kalibangan itself, which appears only as a labelled site on one map.

Live History India repeats the usual explanation that the Harappans left Kalibangan because the Ghaggar dried up. The dates fit that account, since the 2020 report’s mature phase ends around 1900 BCE, but the ASI reports and the 2012 paper do not tie this one town’s end to a single cause.

An ASI museum stands at the site, about 27 km from Hanumangarh according to the documentation record of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. The 2020 report on the mature town carries a preface signed by Lal on 30 May 2007, thirteen years before it was printed.