Cuisine on the Harappan Frontier: Regional Cooking Vessels in Harappan Gujarat

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE, the western Indian state of Gujarat was home to a regional expression of Harappan culture known as the Sorath Harappans. This cultural group was composed of a network of farmers, herders, and craftsmen that subsided on an economy based on cattle herding and the farming of summer crops. Unlike the core regions of the Harappan culture that relied on the cultivation of winter crops such as barley and wheat, archaeobotanical evidence from several Sorath Harappan sites in Gujarat revealed a preference for small seed cereals, primarily millets. Additionally, these settlements produced a distinctive corpus of ceramic vessels. This paper explores one subset of the Sorath ceramic assemblage: cooking and storage vessels. While there are parallels between classical Indus vessel forms and those of the Sorath Harappans, this class of vessels are wholly Sorath in character. This paper analyzes the macrostructural and microstructural aspects of these Sorath Harappan vessels in order to understand how two intertwined industries, agricultural and ceramic production, contributed to the local food culture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23424