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Discovery and Excavation
The ruins of Harappa were first described in 1842 by Charles Masson in his
Narrative of Various Journeys in Baluchistan, Afghanistan and the Panjab, where
locals talked of an ancient city extending "thirteen cosses" (about 25 miles),
but no archaeological interest would attach to this for nearly a century.
In 1856, British engineers John and William Brunton were laying the East Indian
Railway Company line connecting Karachi and Lahore. John wrote: "I was much
exercised in my mind how we were to get ballast for the line of the railway."
They were told of an ancient ruined city near the lines, called Brahminabad.
Visiting the city, he found it full of hard well-burnt bricks; and "convinced
that there was a grand quarry for the ballast I wanted", the city of Brahminabad
was reduced to ballast.. A few months later, further north, John's brother
William Brunton's "section of the line ran near another ruined city, bricks from
which had already been used by villagers in the nearby village of Harappa at the
same site. These bricks now provided ballast along 93 miles of the railroad
track running from Karachi to Lahore."
It was more than half a century later, in 1912, that Harappan seals-with the
then unknown symbols-were discovered by J. Fleet, prompting an excavation
campaign under Sir John Hubert Marshall in 1921/22, and resulting in the
discovery of the hitherto unknown civilization at Harappa by Sir John Marshall,
Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni and Madho Sarup Vats, and at Mohenjo-daro by Rakhal
Das Banerjee, E. J. H. MacKay, and Sir John Marshall. By 1931, much of
Mohenjo-Daro had been excavated, but excavations continued, such as that led by
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944.
Among other archaeologists who worked on IVC sites before the partition of the
subcontinent in 1947 were Ahmad Hasan Dani, Brij Basi Lal, Nani Gopal Majumdar,
and Aurel Stein.
Following the partition of British India, the area of the IVC was divided
between Pakistan and India, and excavations from this time include those led by
Sir Mortimer Wheeler in 1949, archaeological adviser to the Government of
Pakistan. Outposts of the Indus Valley civilization were excavated as far west
as Sutkagan Dor in Baluchistan, as far north as the Oxus river in current
Afghanistan