Harappa Primary History

I'm Nimra. I live in Pakistan,

home to a large part of the Indus civilisation.

The Indus civilisation existed 4,500 years ago

in the area which is now known as Pakistan and Northern India.

The major excavated sites

in Pakistan are Mohenjo-daro

and Harappa.

A lot of the historical sites are a long way from where I live.

I live in Karachi,

a big city.

Around 15 million people live here.

It's where the port is,

and lots of business happens here.

Today, Karachi is known as the commercial capital of Pakistan.

This is my home.

I'm packing for a trip.

I'm going to find out the history of my country in 2,500 BC.

'This is my friend Sara.

'She's coming along, too.'

We're going to Harappa,

one of the most important archaeological sites

in the whole of the Indus civilisation.

We're going to meet Dr Asma Ibrahim, an archaeologist.

She's going to tell us what life was like for the Indus people,

and how archaeologists know about it.

An archaeologist is a person who is studying the past

and the ancient lives of people, how they were living,

so, basically, an archaeologist is an historian as well.

Archaeologists have to carefully analyse and record

every single artefact which survives.

Sometimes, it's the only way they can piece together how people used to live -

like a jigsaw with bits missing.

What is the best thing you've found in Harappa?

Well, for me, the best thing which we found at Harappa

was the skeletons, human skeletons.

We excavated this area. This is the area where the skeletons were found.

Archaeologists think people in the cemetery could have been quite well off.

You know, bones can tell us a lot about a person

and the people of the time here.

Is this a real skeleton or not?

Yes, it's a real skeleton. We excavated it from the Harappa site.

How do you know how the Harappan people lived?

Well, we can study the bones and we can tell how they lived,

what was their profession.

You see these lines on the bones?

These are due to the attachment of the muscles.

The person who is more hardworking will have stronger bones,

and there will be more marks.

-How do you know what they ate?

-Through their teeth,

you can tell what they were eating.

If we take a specimen from the teeth

and analyse those under the microscope,

you can tell what diet they had.

The second thing is, whether they were eating more meat or vegetables

is very easy to tell from of the size of the teeth.

If the teeth are not very worn out,

that means they were having vegetables, an easy diet.

If they were eating more meat,

then the teeth would be more damaged or smaller in size.

-Is this a male or a female?

-This is a boy.

How do you know this is a boy?

We have many ways to tell if this is a male or a female.

The first thing is the size of the skull.

The size of the skull is smaller in females. The size of the jaw

is smaller in females. And then the size of the pelvic area

is bigger in the females because of childbirth.

Generally, the bones of the females are smaller than the males.

There are many different clues

which can help us to build up a picture of how old an artefact is.

A process known as radiocarbon dating

can help to date the age of any object which has been alive.

After death, the objects release a substance called radioactive carbon.

How much is left in the item

can help the scientist work out how old it is.

We can also get a good idea of how old something is

when we take it out of the ground.

Even fragments of bones, seeds and broken artefacts

can provide important clues.

Here we come to one of the trenches on the side.

How deep an artefact was buried can give us a good idea

of when it was buried and therefore how old it is.

It's called stratigraphy. It's a bit like the layers of a cake,

each layer representing a different time.

Can you see the different layers here?

What can you see buried here?

-What are these?

-These are, um...

-animal bones.

-What do you think they did with the animals?

The people of Harappa were very well advanced people,

and they started domesticating the animals,

so they were using them for daily life, agricultural life,

having the milk from the cows,

so they knew all about how to domesticate the animals.

-What type of animal bones are these?

-Well, they are bulls,

dogs and cows.

-How do you know?

-We take the measurements of the bones

and through the size of the bones, we can tell -

a cow or a bull or a dog.

-What did the Harappans eat?

-We believe

that they used to include every kind of nutrition.

They had wheat, barley, vegetables, and meat also, so maybe this menu

had a variety of different things.

It is likely that they had plenty of choice on the menu

as people have in Pakistan today.

Harappa was stumbled upon by accident in the 1820s

by a slightly shady character by the name of Charles Masson.

He was the first person

to bring this ancient site to the attention of westerners,

but no-one really knew how old it was.

Charles Masson might have inadvertently alerted the world

to one of the oldest civilisations in existence,

but he also had a big secret.

His real name was James Lewis

and he was a deserter from the British Army.

The British were trying to get a foothold

in this part of the country.

He was found out, and forced to work as a spy

in return for an official pardon.

Charles Masson, James Lewis, whatever he was called,

nonetheless publicised the ancient site in his travel book

and it captured the attention of the world and the archaeologists.

But there was a problem with Harappa.

Its great walls and buildings had already been demolished,

mostly by the British and also by the local people.

The bricks had been taken away

and used to build houses and over 200km of railway track

between Lahore and Multan.

Some of the houses in modern Harappa

are built out of the stolen 4,500-year-old bricks,

and they still stand today. Why do you think that's possible?

This is due to the fact that, in 2600 BC,

the Indus people developed an advanced technology.

They baked their bricks in fire

as well as the less-advanced method of sun-drying bricks.

Fired bricks are stronger.

Bricks around the world, in Pakistan and in Britain today,

are still baked in fire.

There are even 4,500-year-old bricks

with animal paw-prints!

That's a dog paw-print

from 2500 BC.

What animal do you think made THIS footprint?

Wow! Dr Asma, look! We've found something.

-It's a piece of pottery.

-Oh, yes. It IS a pot.

-This is a small pot.

-It's all broken up.

Yeah, it seems to be broken up

-and now we must be very careful to take this out.

-Looks like pottery.

-You can see the rims of the pot?

-Yes.

-Whenever we find

some object like this, we are really excited,

and we have to see which period it belongs to.

-What did it look like at that time?

-When we take it out,

we will study if there is any pattern on it,

and then we can tell if this is a typical Harappan pot.

They were usually red pots with black paint on it.

Common patterns are fish scales...

..leaves...

and circles.

When the items have been excavated,

the archaeologist then records exactly where it was found

and what it was.

This can help us to classify or group the pieces together

which can then offer more clues than just an individual object.

The jars are all grouped as pottery.

They were used for cooking or storage

so they have been placed with other domestic or household items.

These artefacts are also terracotta pottery.

How would YOU classify or group them?

-Ah, look.

-Bangles.

These bangles are also made out of terracotta, like the pots.

We could put all the terracotta artefacts together,

but do you think they should be categorised as jewellery instead?

In modern Pakistan and India,

bangles are an important part of traditional costume.

This tiny bronze statue,

possibly a dancing girl, is wearing lots of bangles,

as Nimra and her friends do

when they do a traditional dance.

MUSICIANS PLAY TRADITIONAL MUSIC

The girls need to do a bit of detective work

to find out exactly what their pottery would have looked like

4,500 years ago. They are taking the fragments

to the exploration and excavation centre in Karachi.

All the artefacts excavated from Pakistan's ancient sites

are assessed here.

-What are they doing?

-They are washing the pottery we excavated.

After it gets washed,

we take it to the draughtsman and he will draw them.

The photographer also needs to catalogue the artefacts.

Archaeologists like to recreate items from the fragments of pottery

to see what it would've looked like in 2500 BC.

Even a small section of rim

can tell us how large a pot might have been,

just by working out the diameter.

It can then be drawn to scale.

From Nimra and Sara's small section of rim,

a whole new pot can be recreated

in the traditional style of Harappan pottery.

It's possible to work out from the girls' fragment

that the original jar would have been red,

and on the red would have been a painted design in black.

After being buried for 4,500 years,

Nimra and Sara's pottery can finally be revealed to the world

as it would have been originally in 2500 BC.

From this fragment of the pottery,

we'll be able to reconstruct the whole pot

on the basis of only one fragment.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast 2005

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