The Story of India 1: Beginnings (9 of 22)

The Story of India

GUPTA: What we've been doing is to look at satellite imagery to try and see if you can trace paleo river channels, essentially, on the flood plains.
WOOD: So this is the area just along the border between India and Pakistan?
GUPTA: That's right, and we are going to basically zoom in on an area over here and look at some satellite imagery in some detail.
So in this satellite imagery, what you can see are these light areas which are desert areas, sand dunes, etc, but snaking through the desert, you can see the trace, this dark channel-like feature which people believe -is the trace of an ancient river.
-Wow.
If we now put the sites on for the main phase of the Harappan civilisation, you can see beautifully how those sites are actually strung along the trace of this ancient channel bed.

WOOD: It is very clear there, isn't it?
Absolutely matches the curve of the channel bed.
And you can trace it actually from India into Pakistan, into the area that's called Cholistan, where you have numeral sites.
WOOD: Oh, yeah, yeah.So this is from the height of the Indus civilisation?
Yeah, probably between 5,000 to 4,000 yeas ago.
When Mohenjo Daro and Harappa are at their height.
So what happens to these sites at the end of the Harappan civilisation?
Actually, if we look at the later Harappan stages...
WOOD: Oh, yes.
What you see is that there is a major shift eastwards, into the eastern part of the...
Central and eastern part of the Ganges Plain, away from the major Ghaggar-Hakra settlements over here.
-Wow.
-In the last 10,000 years, we've actually seen a progressive decline in the strength of the Indian summer monsoon and particularly around...
Some people suggest that around 3,500 years ago, there was actually a major decrease in the strength of the monsoon.