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ARCHAEOLOGY: THE AHARS
Piecing
the Ahar Puzzle
Excavation of sites from the
4,500 year old Ahar culture provide clues to the link between the Harappans
and their predecessors
By Rohit Parihar
That it existed
at all was a surprise-a fortified enclosure of mud and brick, comparable
to the citadels of the Harappans, spread over 500 sq m. It was filled
with ash and cowdung. A people called the Ahars had built it in Balathal
near modern Udaipur some 4,500 years ago. Carbon dating established that
they had lived in and around the Mewar region in Rajasthan between 3,500
 and
1,800 B.C. They were Mewar's first farmers, older even than the Harappans.
But why had they built a fort only to fill it with ash and cowdung? To
solve the mystery, a team of Indian archaeologists excavating the site
went on removing layer after layer of civilisation. The mystery deepened.
They found five skeletons, four in layers between 2,000 B.C. and 1,800
B.C. That was the age of stone and copper, the chalcolithic age. This
was the first time human skeletons had been found at any Ahar site. The
Ahars, it had been thought, cremated their dead. And the Harappans buried
theirs.
Who were the Ahars?
There are 90 sites of Ahar-a rural society. The
recent round of excavations is establishing that Ahar culture and Harappan
civilisation were different though contemporary and related. This village
life emerged much before the mature Harappan era. Harappa's progress in
the mature Harappan period (2,500 B.C.) helped the rural Ahar people to
flourish and develop their own township and stone and brick houses. On
the scale of civilisation, they emerged far ahead of other chalcolithic
cultures in the subcontinent. And they may be the missing link to show
how the Indus people made such a quantum leap from small rural communities
to an advanced civilisation. Ahar culture flourished predominantly in
the Mewar region of Rajasthan, on the eastern side of the Aravallis, and
in undulating rocky plateaus and plains along the Banas river and its
tributaries. In modern Rajasthan, Ahar sites have been reported in Udaipur,
Chittorgarh, Dungarpur, Bhilwara, Rajsamand, Bundi, Tonk and Ajmer dotting
10,000 sq km. "There is a commonality in all 90-sites located in
South eastern Rajasthan and parts of Madhya Pradesh,'' says Jaipur-based
Rima Hooja, a scholar on Ahar culture.
Their name comes from a mid-1950s excavation
led by R.C. Aggarwal, former director of archaeology, Rajasthan, at Ahar
near Udaipur. A few years later, one excavation was carried out at Gilund
in Rajsamand and then the focus shifted to the Harappans. The Deccan College,
Pune and Institute of Rajasthan Studies, Rajasthan Vidyapeeth, Udaipur
turned their attention to Ahar culture in 1994 and began excavations in
Balathal. Deccan College and the University of Pennsylvania began digging
in Gilund in 1999 and the Jaipur circle of Archaeological Survey of India
(ASI) began excavation at Ojiyana in Bhilwara in 2000. And discoveries
began pouring in.
Gwen Robbins, a biological anthropologist from
the University of Oregon, USA, in her ongoing preliminary analysis of
the bones, found the first skeleton uncovered was of a male. Dead at the
age of 50, he suffered from a joint disease and had lost all but four
of his teeth at least five years before death. On closer inspection of
the remains, a left mandible and a few cranial fragments were found to
be of a second individual aged 35 whose sex couldn't be determined. The
third skeleton was of a female approximately 35 years of age. The fourth
was of a 35-year-old woman, and it caught the archaeologists' interest.
It had been buried with a small earthen lota (pot) near the head. Why
was the lota there? "I am certain that the fortified enclosure had
a ritual function,'' says Dr V.N. Mishra, former principal of the Deccan
College, who led the excavations: "You don't find such selective
burials in cow dung and ash anywhere else.'' The fifth skeleton, from
a different era, was of an adult male 35 to 40 years old, and had been
buried in a seated position that resembles the modern samadhi burial of
sadhus who renounce the world. The ritual of burial in ash and cowdung
raises the need to look at related traditions in present-day Hindu communities
such as Gosain and Jogi which bury their dead.
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