Rakhigarhi - Biggest Indus Valley Civilization Site

Hello Friends, we all must have heard about Indus Valley civilization & the famous sites of Harappa & Mohenjo-Daro, but do you know that among the settlements there are total of 5 major urban centers. Along with Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro & Ganeriwala that lie in present day Pakistan, 2 sites of Dholavira & Rakhigarhi lie in present India.
Today we’ll have a peek at Rakhigarhi, the largest of all Indus River Valley sites.
Rakhigarhi is a village in Hisar District in the state of Haryana in India, situated 150 kilometers to the northwest of Delhi. Most scholars believe it to be between 80 hectares to about 100 hectares in area. Some Indian archaeologists, however, have claimed that the earliest settlements in Rakhigarhi predate the Indus Valley Civilization, and the site itself is 300 hectares in area. Rakhigarhi is located in the valley of the prehistoric Drishadvati River.
In 1963, Archaeological Survey of India i.e. ASI began excavations at this site. Further excavations were conducted by ASI between 1997 and 2000. However, recent excavations starting from 2011 till present have been proved to be the most fruitful with findings of new pottery, seals, burials, etc. Deccan College and the Haryana archaeological department have been jointly carrying out the excavation at the site from last three years. Experts from the Seoul National University, College of Medicine in South Korea are also involved in the excavation.
There are nine mounds in Rakhigarhi which are named RGR-1 to RGR-9
Archaeological findings and scientific data have indicated that Rakhigarhi had been the more important centre of the Indus Valley Civilisation than the townships of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro located in Pakistan
The team of archaeologists revealed that the excavation at this site is all set to change the view that Mohenjo-Daro was the capital city of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Instead, the scientific data collected on the basis of excavations here have strongly pointed that Rakhigarhi, was a metropolis and was perhaps the capital of its time about 5,000 years ago.
Evidences of massive manufacturing and trade activities in this town, which revealed the economic organisation and the foreign links of people here, have been collected. People here had trade links with people in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Baluchistan and even Afghanistan. The city flourished during the early Harappan era dating back to around 3,300 BC and existed till 2000 BC.

Moreover, the DNA samples collected from the skeletons at the cemetery here are set to crack a major mystery surrounding their lives, character, diseases and race of the people who lived here 5,000 years ago.
Since Rakhigarhi was turning out to be the biggest and most crucial Harappan site in the world, the state government had decided to set up a museum, research centre and a hostel for the researchers in the village.
The excavation work at the Harappan site has got a major breakthrough with the recovery of around 15 human skeletons from mound no.7 during the ongoing excavation. The leader of the research team and head of Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Vasant Shinde, said that the deposits they have found in various layers at Rakhigarhi go as deep as 22 metre. No other site has such extensive deposits. For example, deposits at Mohenjo-Daro go down to only 17 metre. This shows, Rakhigarhi area was a bustling metropolis as long back as 5000 to 5500 BC and continued to thrive. People continued to live there for long.

There is an interesting question arising nowadays, that whether people now living in Haryana's Hisar district is the oldest continuous living habitat in the world. Scientists are anxiously awaiting complete results of the DNA tests of samples taken from Rakhigarhi. Officials have taken DNA samples from skeletons recovered from the archeological dig as well as residents of Rakhigarhi village of today. Although initial results have been exciting, the full results of the research project are not out yet.

There are difficulties in excavating in this area for example take the case of mound RGR-5 which is thickly populated by establishment of Rakhishahpur village and is not available for excavations.

However, these are definitely great moments in study of pre-historic India and new excavations might reveal findings that might just shed new light about links between Indus valley civilization & current Bharat. The size and uniqueness of Rakhigarhi has drawn much attention of archaeologists all over the world. It is nearer to Delhi indicating the spread of Indus Valley Civilization up to this distance of North India.

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