The Published Archaeobotanical Data from the Indus Civilisation, South Asia, c.3200–1500BC

J Bates

doi:10.5334/joad.57

Abstract

The collection of this dataset of published archaeobotanical data from the Indus Civilisation (c.3200–1500BC) was carried out by the author as part of her doctoral work, and has continued up to October 2017. The dataset represents a systematic collation of all primary published macrobotanical data, regardless of their designation as ‘crop’, ‘fully domesticated’ or ‘wild/weedy’ species. The dataset comprises 63 sites and 339 ‘taxa’ (including less confidently identified elements such as ‘charred seed’). Data is presented as presence/absence due to different sampling, quantification and data presentation practices. Funding statement: This paper developed out of research conducted while the author was a PhD student working as part of the Land, Water and Settlement project, which has been investigating human–environment relations in northwest India. It presents material gathered for a literature review that formed part of the author’s PhD dissertation, and expanded upon during her first post-doctoral position as Trevelyan research fellow at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. The PhD research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), United Kingdom (Grant No. 1080510), and this paper has been written up while she has been a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, and published while she is a post doctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. The Land, Water and Settlement project ran from 2007 to 2014 and was primarily funded by a Standard Award from the UK India Education Research Initiative United Kingdom (UKIERI) under the title ‘From the collapse of Harappan urbanism to the rise of the great Early Historic cities: Investigating the cultural and geographical transformation of northwest India between 2000 and 300 BC’. Smaller grants were also awarded by the British Academy’s Stein Arnold Fund, United Kingdom, the Isaac Newton Trust, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, United Kingdom, and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), United Kingdom.

Highlights

The expansive nature of the Indus Civilisation meant that settlements geographically and culturally differred, and this is reflected in their modelled subsistence practices [26, 27, 32, 5, 33, 37, 20, 35, 21, 23]
There has been a long history of archaeobotany in the Indus Civilisation, with reviews of published data as far back as [7, 8, 9]
Recent reviews include [12] exploring a pan-South Asian plant use and the role of the Indus within this [25], highlighting the eastern and southern Indus plant exploitation, and species specific reviews such as [19, 34, 24]. [13] used a rank-order analysis to look at specific crop species from Indus sites, while [10, 11] and [38] looked at specific sites in the Indus

Summary

DATA PAPER

The Published Archaeobotanical Data from the Indus Civilisation, South Asia, c.3200–1500BC. Systematic reviews of the datasets can be found in the works of [31] and [15] who explored the wider archaeobotanical research of South Asia. This dataset seeks to build on these and update them to the current day by looking at the published Indus archaeobotanical data available up to October 2017. Bates: The Published Archaeobotanical Data from the Indus Civilisation, South Asia, c.3200–1500BC This conclusion highlights the need for more systematic recording and reporting styles in Indus archaeobotany, and for the continued interaction with this dataset to incorporate the quantified and roughly quantified data, as well as the unquantified datasets

Spatial coverage

Data type Primary

Licence CCo

New World species