Domestic Craft Specialization and Social Spatial Organization of Harappa

Summary

The site of Harappa, Pakistan, was a major urban center of the Indus Civilization with over two thousand years of occupation (3700-1700 BCE). The site did not have an obvious civic ceremonial center but was instead multi-nodal with walled sub-divisions. As an aspect of stone tool assemblage analysis at the site, the most functionally relevant attributes of the blade tools were differentially weighted to produce a soft hierarchical clustering classification scheme. These classes are considered temporally and contextually, across spatially distinct walled administrative districts and proposed social neighborhoods within these walled mounds. The relationships of the tool classes between and within the mounds were evaluated via correspondence analysis. Each of the districts is found to have a limited repetition of crafts, suggesting that some level of economic integration was a factor that contributed to the cohesion of this decentralized urban center. Analysis of chipped stone tools at the neighborhood level identified previously unknown centers of craft specialization of perishable products and craft specialist activities taking place in domestic contexts. Possibly two different textile traditions were important both for occupational specialization and neighborhood and community membership.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21866