YouTube video by Discovery Past Pakistan

This documentary introduces the public to the activities of the archeozoology team, led by M. Mashkour, during the pakistani-french excavations at the Bronze Age - Indus Valley Civilization site of Chanhu-daro. Chanhu-daro is the only site in the Indus plain where extended excavations are taking place since 2015 and provides a unique view of urbanism and subsistance patterns for South Asian Bronze (ca 5000 BCE) age archaeology "Dr. Marjan Mashkour is an Archaeozoologist, specialist of the South West Asian mammalian and bird remains. During the past 29 years. She worked in Iran, Irak, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia, United Arab Emirates, Oman. Now she attached with FRENCH ARCHAEOLOGICAL MISSION IN THE INDUS BASIN (MAFBI). At Chanhu Daro, an archaeological site in Sindh-Pakistan". [D.A. Sheik]

The French Archaeological Mission in the Indus Basin is thrilled to congratulate Asma Ayoob Khiljee, a valued member of #MAFBI since 2021, on receiving the prestigious PhD Eiffel Excellence Scholarshi...

<div><p>Between 2016 and 2020, a massive stone bead workshop associated to dwelling units was discovered at Chanhu-daro site (Trench 2 and 3) and dated to the first period of the Indus Civilization (2600/2500-2300 BCE). A huge amount of different raw materials (e.g. flint, steatite, agate, carnelian, jasper, ernestite) was processed and debitage wastes of both knapping and cutting activities were identified. Tools for manufacturing, perforating or polishing the stone beads (e.g. blades, drills/borers, polishers, hammers, pressure flaker) -some of them unique and exceptionally preserved -were found together. Several beads roughouts, preforms, and finished products were also documented. For the first time (so-far) contextualized data about an intensive craft production from the first Indus period will be discussed. The evidence found at Chanhu-daro site will help reconstructing the whole stone beads manufacturing processes and investigating the related technical system.</p></div>

"The results presented below come from a Master 2 research thesis. It was carried out at the University Paris 1 - Panthéon-Sorbonne (2021-2022) [within the frame of the French Archaeological Mission in the Indus Basin] . This thesis had multiple objectives : • Establishing a list of Chanhu-daro’s zoomorphic terracotta figurines in order to establish typologies specific to the site; • Detecting any link between zoomorphic figurines and their characteristics, on the one hand, and their distribution on the site and their context of discovery on the other; • Studying the traces present on the zoomorphic figurines as well as their decorations and morphology to understand the modalities of their manufacture. The corpus includes 401 figurines from the Indus Civilisation site of Chanhu-daro (Sindh, Pakistan). They were found during the excavations and surveys of: • MAFBI since 2015; • N. G. Majumdar, in 1931; • E. J. H. Mackay, from 1935 to 1936. They were dated in majority from the first Indus period (2600/2500-2300 BCE), but also from the second Indus period (2300-2100 BCE) and the third Indus period (2100-1900 BCE)."

Cette vidéo traite de Pakistan_2020_V2