Excavations at Shikarpur: A Harappan Site in Gujarat
This lecture will present the most recent information from ongoing excavations at the Harappan site of Shikarpur in Kachchh district, Gujarat, Western India. Excavations in the last four seasons have brought to light a fortified small settlement that played a major role in the transfer of Harappan technology in economic production into Saurashtra and other parts of Gujarat. The
large volume of evidence unearthed in the excavation reveals a threefold developmental sequence of habitation which shows different degrees of interaction that existed with other contemporary cultural regions of Gujarat. In addition, the excavation provides some interesting insight into the overall planning of the settlement and diverse features of the Harappan resource
management at the site.
Ajithprasad Pottentavida, Ph.D., is a professor of archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. His primary research interests are issues related to understanding cultural evolution and human adaptation in the Quaternary period. Over the years he has worked in Stone Age prehistory, especially in Gujarat, and was instrumental in discovering several Acheulian and later Palaeolithic sites in their primary context. He is also involved in the investigation of the Harappan/Chalcolithic cultural expansion in North Gujarat and Saurashtra. At present, he is co-director of the North Gujarat Archaeological Project (NoGAP) in collaboration with scholars from Spain. The collaborative project is looking at the beginning of agro-pastoral lifeways in North Gujarat. He has been a visiting faculty at the Institute of Archaeology, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), New Delhi and also at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan.
This lecture has been made possible by support from the Rao Bahadur Kashinath Narayan Dikshit Memorial
Fund, Department of Anthropology, UW-Madison