EXCAVATIONvS AT CHANHU-DARO BY THE AMERICAN 

 SCHOOL OF INDIC AND IRANIAN STUDIES AND THE 

 MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON: SEASON 1935-36 ' 



By Ernest Mackay 

 Field Director 



[With 10 plates] 



The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, now possesses a remarkable and 

 widely representative collection of objects from the ancient Indus 

 Valley, the only such collection outside India. Not only is the culture 

 of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro well represented at Chanhu-daro in 

 the Nawabshah District of Sind (fig. 1), the site at which this collection 

 was unearthed, but there were also found the seal-amulets and pottery 

 of a people who occupied the site fairly soon after it had been deserted 

 by the Harappa people, objects which it will be seen differ radically 

 from those left by their predecessors. 



The mounds of Chanhu-daro were selected for the prehminary inves- 

 tigations of the first American archeological expedition to India on 

 account of important finds made there during a survey of the ancient 

 sites of Sind by the Archeological Department of the Government of 

 India in the winter season 1929-30. Mr. N. G. Majumdar, who dug 

 thi-ee trial trenches there, showed that Chanhu-daro had been occupied 

 by the same race that built the cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa 

 some 5,000 years ago. He also found some slight evidence of the 

 presence of a later civilization which can now be named the "Jhukar 

 culture", in accordance with the convenient practice in Egypt and 

 Mesopotamia of naming a culture after the site where traces of it were 

 first found. The so-called Indus VaUey civilization should be renamed 

 the "Harappa culture", for further excavations in the great river valley 

 will undoubtedly reveal the remains of yet other ancient cultures. 



Chanhu-daro is some 12 miles east of the present bed of the Indus, 

 about 80 miles SSE. of Mohenjo-daro. Its three mounds comprise 

 an area of 9 acres, but the little city was considerably more extensive 

 in ancient times and the alluvium deposited in the course of 5,000 years 

 or more now covers the lower parts of the mounds. Mound I is 22.2 



' Reprinted by permission from the Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts, vol. 34, no. 205, Boston, October 

 1936. 



469 



