Looking beneath the veneer. Thoughts about environmental and cultural diversity in the indus civilization

Abstract

There is clear evidence for degrees of uniformity in specific types of material culture that were used across the large area occupied by the populations that comprised the Indus Civilization. There is also evidence that there was considerable cultural diversity across its environmentally varied extent. J. Mark Kenoyer and others have described the cultural material that is widely attested across this area as a veneer that overlays a considerable degree of variation in material use and practices (e.g. Meadow and Kenoyer 1997). The tension between uniformity and diversity has significant ramifications for our understanding of a range of social, economic, and even political factors relating to Indus populations in the periods before, during and after South Asia’s first period of urbanism. This contribution considers the range of variability inherent during these periods by assessing the diversity evident in four different categories of data, and the relationships between those datasets.