Photo: Mohitnarayanan · CC BY-SA 3.0Rows of small clay-lined fire pits on raised brick platforms, with a well and bathing floors beside them.
On one platform of the southern citadel seven fire pits stood in a row, holding ash and charcoal, with a clay stele in the middle of some and animal bones near by. A well and paved bathing places were set beside them. Many houses in the lower town had a fire pit of their own. Similar pits were found at Lothal and Banawali.
B. B. Lal read them as altars of a fire ritual, with bathing before worship, a practice that still marks the Vedic yajna and the Hindu home.
ExcavationHundreds of sandstone shelters where people lived and painted for thousands of years, the oldest gallery of human art in Bharat.
ExcavationEleven molar crowns from nine adults with neat holes drilled into them, the earliest evidence of dentistry on living people anywhere.
ExcavationA Sarasvati-valley settlement whose levels run from Hakra ware pit-dwellings up to a mature Harappan town, and whose earliest dates are argued over.
ExcavationThe oldest ploughed field yet excavated anywhere, with its furrows still visible in a grid.
ExcavationA Harappan city in a dry land that lived by catching every drop: dams on two seasonal streams fed a chain of reservoirs cut into the rock around the town.
ExcavationThe first city of the civilisation to be dug, which gave its name to the whole culture.
ExcavationThe largest city of the Sindhu valley, laid out in a grid of baked-brick streets with covered drains and a great bath on its citadel.
ExcavationA small steatite seal of a figure seated in a yogic posture, wearing a horned headdress and surrounded by animals, whom many see as Pashupati, Lord of creatures.
