Vadnagar in Gujarat Has Been Settled for About 2,700 Years, and Excavations Since 2006 Found a Shell Industry, Indo-Greek Coin Moulds and a Buddhist Monastery Inside the Town Wall

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) says the dig at Vadnagar in Mehsana district, north Gujarat, has found continuous habitation from the mid-8th century BCE to the present. Its excavators report accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates that take the town back to about 750 BCE, under a pile of occupation debris roughly 24 m deep. India’s submission to UNESCO’s Tentative List, filed on 13 December 2022 under criteria (ii) and (v), calls it a town lived in for more than 2,700 years.

The finds behind that claim are shell bangles, glass beads from the Indian Ocean trade, a mould for coins of an Indo-Greek king, a Buddhist monastery and 36 linked water bodies that the dossier calls still active. Where press coverage went further than the excavators’ own papers, the sections below say so.

A town where two trade routes crossed

Vadnagar lies about 90 km south of Gandhinagar and 110 km from Ahmedabad airport. The UNESCO dossier, written by India, says the ancient town stood where two major trade routes met: one joined central India to Sindh and the north-west, the other linked the port towns of the Gujarat coast to northern India. It adds that Vadnagar was known as a land port, a sthal pattan, of Gujarat.

The old names are Anandpur, Anartapur, Vriddhanagar and Nagar. The ASI authors trace Anandpur in the copper-plate land grants of the Maitraka kings of Vallabhi and in two clay sealings carrying the name Anandpur, found in layers of the Kshatrapa period (the dynasty of Shaka rulers in western India). The town today is L-shaped, with Sharmishtha Lake on its north-eastern edge, and sits on a mound whose highest point, near the ruined citadel called Darbargadh, is about 25 m above the surrounding ground.

Who dug, and when

The digging came in stages. The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda excavated in 1953 to 1954 to study the dating of Red Polished Ware, a pottery type. After a gap of about 40 years, the Gujarat Directorate of Archaeology and Museums returned from 2006 to 2012, prompted by the 1992 discovery of a Bodhisattva image, which was the first solid sign of a Buddhist presence. The ASI’s Excavation Branch V in Vadodara began in 2014 and worked eight field seasons through 2022, with the aim of fixing the sequence of settlement and supplying material for a museum.

ThePrint reports that Abhijit Ambekar, the ASI archaeologist, has led the project since 2016, and that the team looked at about 30 sites across the town. Alongside the ASI, a group led by Anindya Sarkar of IIT Kharagpur, with colleagues from JNU, the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and Deccan College in Pune, published the climate and chronology paper in Quaternary Science Reviews in January 2024. I could not open the paper itself, only its Crossref record, so what follows about it rests on the authors’ statements as reported by PTI, ThePrint and The Statesman, and on the ASI authors’ own earlier paper.

Seven cultural periods

The ASI authors and the UNESCO dossier give the same sequence of seven successive cultures, from a period before the town had a rampart to the present. Period I is earlier than the 2nd century BCE. Period II runs from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE, and Period III from the 1st to the 4th century CE. Period IV covers the 5th to the 9th or 10th century, Period V the 10th to the 13th, Period VI the 14th to the 17th, and Period VII the 17th or 18th century to the 19th.

The press describes the same seven stages by dynasty, and the lists do not match one for one. The IIT Kharagpur statement, as carried by PTI, names Mauryan, Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian or Shaka-Kshatrapa, Hindu-Solanki, Sultanate-Mughal and Gaekwad-British. ThePrint’s longer list adds the Maitrakas and the Rashtrakuta-Pratihara-Chavada phase. The ASI’s numbered periods are the safer frame, because they are tied to the layers.

A wall that is older than its inscription

The ASI authors report that the first defence was an earthen rampart, datable to the 2nd century BCE, which was later replaced by a brick wall laid on the same line. They write that the rampart can be considered the earliest defence structure in Gujarat, and that a defence of one kind or another has stood for about 2,200 years. The northern stretch beside Sharmishtha Lake was fortified later, from the 3rd or 4th century CE. The UNESCO dossier puts the walled area at 1 km east to west and 700 m north to south, with a perimeter of about 3.4 km and six gates.

An inscription from the Solanki period tells a different story. The Vadnagar Prasasti, a praise-poem on a stone slab in the Arjun-Bari near the town’s tank, was published in Epigraphia Indica by G. Buhler and V. G. Ojha. It is dated Vikrama Samvat 1208, which Buhler places between 1150 and 1152 CE, and says that King Kumarapala, out of devotion, ordered a rampart built to protect the Brahman settlement of Nagara, also called Anandapura. Buhler remarks that, given the town’s early importance, it is astonishing that the poem asserts it had no walls until then. The ASI’s reading is that Kumarapala rebuilt an existing fortification: Ambekar told ThePrint that the king “rebuilt the fortification”. The excavated rampart and the 12th-century gate both survive, and the sources I opened do not say how much of the standing wall belongs to which builder.

Shell, beads and coins

The excavators found a shell-working industry that starts in the earliest levels and runs to the 14th or 15th century CE. The raw material was the sacred conch, Turbinella pyrum, brought from the Gulf of Kachchh, and the town made bangles, beads and pendants, with the designs growing more elaborate over time. The ASI authors say this shows shell technology carried on after the Harappan period, when earlier scholars had assumed a gap. The UNESCO dossier counts about 11,000 shell bangles in 29 design varieties, and notes that cowries, which came historically from the Maldives, turned up in an inland town.

Glass beads add the sea. The ASI paper reports Indo-Pacific beads, small drawn monochrome glass beads found from the East African coast to Japan, in layers from the 2nd century BCE to the 17th or 18th century, making up about half of all beads found. The dossier lists imports and contacts from the dig: a clay mould for coins of the Indo-Greek king Apollodotus II (given there as 80 to 65 BCE), a sealing stamped with a Roman coin of Valentinian I (364 to 367 CE), torpedo-shaped storage jars of a Mesopotamian type, and a glazed jar that matches ones from Mleiha in the United Arab Emirates. A gold coin of 16.22 mm and 3.39 g is probably a dinar of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt from the 15th century, which the ASI authors call a preliminary identification.

The ASI authors also point to a temple of Sikotar Mata, a goddess worshipped by Gujarat’s seafaring communities, and note the belief that the name comes from the island of Socotra, a halting point for Indian sailors.

Xuanzang’s town and its monastery

The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang came through around 640 CE (ThePrint gives 641). The ASI paper quotes a translation of his account for a country called O-nan-to-pu-lo, identified as Anandapura: about ten monasteries with fewer than 1,000 monks of the Sammatiya school, and several tens of temples of the gods. Buhler, in the Epigraphia Indica note, says Xuanzang gives the earliest mention of the place. The pilgrim’s wider travels are covered in our article on Faxian, Xuanzang and Yijing.

The dig supports him. At Ghaskol, inside the fortified town, the Gujarat directorate’s dig of 2006 to 2012 uncovered a monastery with an open courtyard ringed by cells on four sides, with a circular and a square votive stupa beside the stepped entrance. Finds include a broken red sandstone head of the Buddha and a plaque showing a monkey offering honey to him. At the Ambaghat site on Sharmishtha Lake, the ASI exposed half of a brick stupa from the 1st to 4th century CE, 5.2 m high with the exposed half measuring 6.7 m across, and 34 clay sealings carrying an invocation of the omniscient. About 30 km north, the hills of Taranga hold around 50 rock shelters made into monks’ dwellings, and the ASI authors say Buddhism survived there until the 14th century.

The ASI authors read the town as a mixed one. They list the monasteries of the 1st century CE, temples and a raised brick platform, a public reading of the Jain Kalpasutra in the 6th century CE and Indo-Islamic buildings of the 14th to 17th century.

Lakes, an earthquake and the monsoon

The UNESCO dossier counts 36 interlinked artificial water bodies still active within 3 km of the town. Sharmishtha Lake is fed by a canal from the Kapila river. The dossier also lists the Paschim Mehtani Vav, a stepwell 67 m long and 5.5 m wide with 11 divisions, and the Gauri Kund, a stepped tank whose walls carry 54 sculptures. The ASI authors argue that droughts pushed the townspeople to build lakes joined by canals first, then stepwells, then wells, and that this knowledge goes back to Harappan water engineering of the kind described in our article on Dholavira.

A trench on the north side, along the lake, shows an earthquake. The ASI authors date it to the 8th or 9th century CE and write that Vadnagar is the second site, after the Harappan town of Kalibangan, where such evidence has been reported and thoroughly documented. Unlike Kalibangan, they say, Vadnagar was not abandoned. Ambekar told ThePrint that settlers usually leave after a quake and these people rebuilt.

The climate study used oxygen isotopes in freshwater mollusc shells from the dig to reconstruct monsoon strength. As ThePrint reports it, each of the seven periods fell in a time of strong monsoons, and from the 13th century CE a severe dry phase hit western India. Ambekar says farmers then moved from rice to millet. The authors also suggest that seven waves of invasion or migration into India over the past 2,200 years came when Central Asia was hyper-arid while the subcontinent had stronger summer monsoons. That is the authors’ interpretation of isotope and dating data, and the sources I opened do not give the data behind it.

How old, and how much of a claim

The published number is about 750 BCE. The ASI paper says AMS dates stretch the town back to 750 BCE (2750 BP), and the dossier gives the same. Sarkar told PTI the earliest settlement began at least about 800 BCE, in the early Iron Age or, he said “questionably”, the Late Vedic period, before Buddhism and Jainism.

He also said that recent unpublished radiocarbon dates suggest the settlement could be as old as 1400 BCE, overlapping the late post-urban Harappan phase, and that if true, “the so-called Dark Age may be a myth”. The 1400 BCE dates were unpublished when he spoke, and the sources I opened give no table for them. ThePrint reports that ASI researchers are examining pottery from Sarval in Patan district, where Harappan sites are known, as a possible link between the late Harappan and early historic periods.

Ambekar and Sarkar describe Vadnagar as the oldest living city within a single fortification in India. The ASI authors’ own paper is more measured. It names two other excavated sites with about 2,700 years of continuity, Rajghat at Varanasi and Purana Qila in Delhi, and notes that Purana Qila is no longer lived in. Dates in the press range from 2,500 years, in the Ministry of Culture’s release, to 3,000 years, in headlines.

The museum over the trench

The Ministry of Culture and the Gujarat government inaugurated the Vadnagar Archaeological Experiential Museum on 16 January 2025. The Press Information Bureau release describes a complex of 12,500 sq m with nine thematic galleries, a 50 m bridge to the excavation, and a 4,000 sq m dig with remains visible up to 16 to 18 m down. The project cost Rs 298 crore, including five years of operations and maintenance, and the museum shows over 5,000 artefacts. It opened to the public on 1 February 2025, and the ASI reported 95,658 visitors up to 31 August 2025.