Archaeological Excavation at Padta Bet | Presentation by Dr. Abhayan G.S.

Summary

In a captivating presentation by Dr. Abhayan G.S., we embark on a journey to the excavation site at Padta Bet, Gujarat. Uncovered here are remnants of a Harappan settlement, featuring unique ceramic innovations not observed at other Harappan locations. The excavation provides evidence of a potential new ceramic tradition and hints at extensive Harappan civilization across the Western Kutch region. Collaborators from various institutions and universities have contributed to this significant discovery, aiming to piece together the Harappan presence, lifestyle, and their burial cultures at this arid locale. The findings are just a start, with future excavations and analyses promising even deeper insights.

Highlights

• Unique pottery styles suggest previously unknown Harappan ceramic traditions. 🏺
• Teamwork across international borders led by Dr. Abhayan G.S. 🤝
• Padta Bet excavation reveals insights into Harappan life and death. 🗿
• Newly identified sites hint at a vast Harappan presence. 🔍
• Future excavations anticipated to broaden our understanding. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Discovery of unique ceramic artifacts suggesting a new Harappan ceramic tradition. 🏺
• Collaborative excavation involving international institutions and universities. 🌍
• Evidence pointing to an extensive Harappan civilization in Western Kutch. 🗺️
• Ongoing analysis aimed at uncovering more about Harappan lifestyle and culture. 🔍
• Initial findings lay groundwork for understanding Harappan burial practices. ⚱️

Overview

Dr. Abhayan G.S. takes us on an enlightening tour through the excavations at Padta Bet, Gujarat, unveiling a Harappan site with a distinct twist. Unlike typical Harappan excavations, this site revealed unique ceramics that may represent a new tradition, sparking excitement about the cultural exchanges in ancient times.

The project is a collaborative effort drawing expertise from India and Europe. Participants from various universities have contributed their skills to understanding the significance of these findings. Notably, the existence of multiple settlement sites around Junak Kaa enhances our understanding of the Harappan's extensive reach.

With the primary phase of excavation revealing promising artifacts, future digs are set to delve deeper into the Harappan civilization. The team plans further analysis, including ancient DNA studies, which may offer unprecedented insights into the Harappan people and their cultural practices.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The chapter 'Introduction' discusses unique features that suggest the emergence of a new camic tradition. These particular shapes have not been observed at other Harappan sites. The transcript begins with an introduction by Dr. L Sh, inviting the audience to explore Indian history and archaeology.
• 00:30 - 01:00: About Dr. Abhayan G.S. This chapter introduces Dr. Abhayan G.S., who has been featured on recent Saturday night shows. For those unfamiliar with him, a link to an interview is provided. The chapter encourages readers to subscribe to the channel and click on the bell icon to receive notifications of all videos, ensuring they don't miss future content featuring Dr. Abhayan G.S.
• 01:00 - 05:30: Excavation at Padta Bet Site The chapter titled 'Excavation at Padta Bet Site' begins with an introduction, connecting it to a previous presentation about Junak Kaa by Dr. Rajesh SV. The speaker, Dr. Abayan, is introduced and takes over to present the findings from the first excavation at the Padta Bet site, located in Kat, Gujarat. The chapter sets the context and invites engagement with the audience to like the video of the presentation.
• 05:30 - 10:00: Site Location and Importance The chapter discusses recent archaeological excavations at the site of Parab, located in the western Kach region, near the Lpath region. The efforts are a continuation of Rajesh's earlier work, focusing on the Baral side of Junaka. The current excavation seeks to extend the knowledge and findings from previous studies.
• 10:00 - 20:00: Structures and Findings The chapter 'Structures and Findings' explores questions related to the site of Junaka and nearby sites, such as Parab. The discussion highlights the excavation as a collaborative effort involving key contributors like Dr. Rajesh and Dr. Francis Kesa Onose from Spain, emphasizing the teamwork essential to the archaeological exploration.
• 20:00 - 30:00: Pottery and Ceramics Analysis The chapter titled 'Pottery and Ceramics Analysis' begins with an introduction of key contributors to an excavation project, including Garia Grano Zu Bandari from Ki University and Charis Gar from Ashoka University. These individuals have been instrumental in the progress and findings of the project. The chapter then transitions to discussing the site's location, which is in the western end of Gujarat, specifically in the Kach region. It highlights the significance of the geographical positioning of the site.
• 30:00 - 35:00: Concluding Remarks This chapter discusses an archaeological site in an arid region called Junaka, which spans 16 hectares. It features numerous burial sites, with 197 having been excavated so far, as presented by Rajes, and roughly 500 more estimated to still be buried.
• 35:00 - 40:00: Discussion and Q&A The chapter titled 'Discussion and Q&A' involves a detailed discussion about the early Harappan Cemetery site. It explores the possibility of other cemetery sites in the surrounding region, asserting that it is the only burial site discovered so far. However, other settlement sites have been found nearby, especially in the vicinity of Junaka. These sites are not very far from the main site, indicating a close geographical connection.
• 40:00 - 44:30: Closing Statements Within a 10-kilometer radius, the closest sites were Ler Parab and D, discovered in early explorations. During 2024 excavations at Pabet, additional sites like Kundas V Vistar near Parab and another site, Cooked K, were identified.

Archaeological Excavation at Padta Bet | Presentation by Dr. Abhayan G.S. Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 uh showing a quite different uh features like I mentioned that could be uh part of a new uh camic tradition because of that those particular kind of shapes have not been reported from other harapan sites so far escalated namaskar and welcome to Indian history and archaeology with me Dr l sh
• 00:30 - 01:00 if you've seen our recent Saturday night shows then Dr aan GS doesn't require an introduction to you but if you missed the interview with him then I'll put a link over here for you of course if you subscribe to the channel and click on the Bell icon to receive all notifications of our videos then you won't miss them Dr abay
• 01:00 - 01:30 presentation is on first excavation the PARTA bit site in Kat Gujarat and this comes as a sequel to last week's presentation on junak Kaa by Dr Rajesh SV now I'll hand over to Dr abayan and please do like the video hello everyone uh this presentation is a short one uh on the
• 01:30 - 02:00 recent excavations at the site of parab which is located in the western part of uh kach region close to lpath region and this is actually a continuation of uh rajesh's work like that uh he explained all about uh the baral side of junaka and this is this excavation is the further
• 02:00 - 02:30 probbing of questions related to junaka and related issues as I mentioned earlier parab is one of the sites uh in the surrounding region of junaka and this excavation is of course a teamwork Dr Rajesh has been an integral part of this and along with that our collaborators from Spain uh Dr Francis kesa onose
• 02:30 - 03:00 um garia Grano Zu bandari from Ki University Charis gar from Ashoka University these people have been contributing a lot in this excavation project when you see the location of this site this is located towards the Western end of Gujarat or Western end of uh kach region and this is a very very
• 03:00 - 03:30 arid region where we have this site of junaka which is spread up in in a 16 hectare area with a large number of uh burials as rajes showed in his previous presentation 197 burials were excavated at the site and apart from that there are a lot of uh unexcavated burials still nearly there should be approximately 500 bual at this large
• 03:30 - 04:00 early harapan Cemetery site and what we look further is more sites surrounding this region this is the only burial site we could locate apart from this baral site we could uh locate some other settlement sites in the vicinity of junaka these sites are not located very far from the site almost all these sites are located
• 04:00 - 04:30 within a 10 kilm radius the closest one being ler parab and D these three sites were discovered in the early years and in this season while we were doing excavations at pabet in 2024 we could identify some other sites as well that is kundas V Vistar that is close to parab another one is cooked k
• 04:30 - 05:00 another one is dwala that is slightly uh far from this locality and these are the sites we identified recently and altogether we have a good number of harapan settlement sites in association with junaka and now we need to look into the connections actual connections these sites are having with the site of junaka or the site or the of um a bigger symmetry
• 05:00 - 05:30 site then among these sites we proposed the excavations at pabet as per that uh we did the excavation in uh February and March of this year and this is the this is an aerial view of the site you can see the site is located on a small Hilo like area
• 05:30 - 06:00 this is the site and this is the rough contour map of the site from these Contour itself you can see the kind of uh location of the site this is an exact uh H here on the slope of this hillo we have a slightly flat area like this and this is the core area that we excavated and this is the area where we have more uh habitation evidence
• 06:00 - 06:30 uh excavat and in the lower reaches of this Hilo also we have some structures here you have one structure and here uh we have two structures and this is an uh aerial view with the actually excavated structures are integrated on top of this map you can see this is the hill lock area and these are the structures visible towards
• 06:30 - 07:00 the down uh part of this hill and here we have a bigger structure and apart from that this area is completely uh vacant of anything that means this area has been eroded a lot because of the particular shape of the landscape especially because of the hilock like uh landscape has a tendency to erode easily and these areas have been eroded very drastically that that is why we assume that the
• 07:00 - 07:30 originally the settlement was uh further extended towards this side also but unfortunately because of the erosions the all the settlement evidence have been eroded this is the Assumption uh we have at present and this is the view of excavated remains from the top of the Hilo and the extreme top end of the Hilo is not uh
• 07:30 - 08:00 habitated probably we we couldn't identify any sort of habitation evidence from the extreme top portion this is just a flat area just on top of the hill loock maybe one towards one side of the hillock and these are some of the structures from the uh Hilltop area this is one example this is structure one this is an interesting structure this is roughly rectangular in shape one portion
• 08:00 - 08:30 Northern portion of the structure has been eroded uh that is why we don't have the continuity of the structure towards that side but what is interesting here is we have one insu uh potteries from from uh from the uh ground level of this structure if you look them look at them uh closely this is the portion where we have these two uh pter is located these
• 08:30 - 09:00 are inue something like a storage J underneath the ground level the ground level is uh visible in the form of these uh stone structures here this is actually placed in a pit within a structure that means it should have been used as a storage or something we clear these two ports but we couldn't uh we couldn't retrieve anything um physically as such but we will go for
• 09:00 - 09:30 some flotation and other sampling methods for the identification of any other microscopic or macroscopic uh things from them and what is interesting here is these among these two poies this one on the right right side is a typically late Haren kind of pottery which has been with the similar kind of pottery has been reported from other harapon sites as well especially from the late harapon phase but this one this larger one is quite a different uh kind
• 09:30 - 10:00 of potery this should be a new potery tradition which has not been reported from any other harapon sites and apart from this complete p uh complete storage are we also came across some other uh portraits from other parts of the site they are also very very much similar to this kind of fabric and they the shapes are also very
• 10:00 - 10:30 different from the usual harapan kind of potteries that is why we assume that this site has a presence of a new ceramic uh type maybe a new tradition that is still that is yet unknown we need to further prob into that and another structure is called a structure two that is U towards east of this structure one and this structure is
• 10:30 - 11:00 also eroded from one side but the half portion is uh intact if you closely observe this uh this is a typical example where we have all the habitation evidence uh from this particular structure importantly from within the structure we uh identified one um shell this is telescopium telescopium that is a species name this is a viable
• 11:00 - 11:30 uh edible kind of shell that means they must have been consuming these kind of shells uh within the structure and apart from that we have uh these these kinds of Po fragments from within the structure and this one is a uh fragmented portrait and this is actually an insute potery like the other one uh but this is something like a crushed one but it was actually
• 11:30 - 12:00 inue and similarly we have potery scatters from outside the structure as well that means this place have been a very active place of habitation or a very active place of um people who settled at this place these are the indications for that and we have another interesting structure that is structure three uh close to that and this is roughly
• 12:00 - 12:30 circular in plan and uh notably these kind of circular structures are common especially towards late harapan phase especially at the late harapan levels at Dava you can still see some of these structures preserved on the side surface and here also we have uh come across so many poter fragments from within and outside the
• 12:30 - 13:00 structure another interesting evidence is a burial from within this uh habitation area on top of this hill close to these two uh close to these three structures I showed before and this uh burial has one uh human skeleton as well when you see the skeleton uh this is the skeleton actually preserved we have one U crushed skull
• 13:00 - 13:30 and we have uh hand portion like this humorous radius salna of two hands and one femur and uh two um tibia fibula is also there and apart from that we uh we could observe some uh ribs only this much is preserved the rest of the things have all been decayed if we conjecture this uh baral as a whole this should be the uh tentative position
• 13:30 - 14:00 of this burial that means this was slightly in a flexed position slightly uh sling towards one side and this is the position of this burial and interestingly this barrial did not yal uh any kind of associated Pottery insitute Pottery but from the deposits we could identify some of the portraits but not from not in in the form of an Institute kind like we uh usually see in
• 14:00 - 14:30 other uh harapan burials but it was an intentional barrial that is evident from the construction of a barrial structure on top of this barrial and this is apparently an young adult this is this could be male or female that we do not know because we did not have a um distinguishable bone uh preserve for the identification of sex and this is as per the interpretations of uh Dr Vina mush who
• 14:30 - 15:00 studied this recently and we have uh another big structure towards the uh downhill this is a very huge structure and what is the purpose of this structure that is not very clear we uh excavated the structure almost half uh this whole structure is completely filled with bigger rubbles
• 15:00 - 15:30 and we we removed the rubbles from half portion and the half portion is left like that and these are some of the Antiquities we recovered from uh some of the trenes uh these are some typical semi preious Stone beads specifically carelian and on the right side are terracota spindle holes they have been uh reported from many many trenes that
• 15:30 - 16:00 is all these are related to the U spinning of uh you know cotton or wool of of that kind and interestingly from another locality at the same site we did a uh single trench having 2 into 2 meter measurement and here the deposit is slightly more and this deposit uh belongs to early harapan we can say this
• 16:00 - 16:30 because of the presence of typical early hopen kind of porty and this kind of porty is very much similar to the kind of py that we usually see from the burials of junaka that is very close to the site and then in that way we can assume that this particular locality was occupied during the early harapan phase and the other locality one which I showed before was probably occupied after this early harapan period probably
• 16:30 - 17:00 during the uh mature harapan or late harapan periods in that way we have a complete uh chronological uh you know stretch of harapan civilization as a as a concluding remarks from these excavations we have two localities one locality One belongs to mature harapan and late harapan phes that is that is said because of the
• 17:00 - 17:30 presence of kind of potery we are familiar with that that matches well with the mature and late harapan phases from the locality to we have exactly similar kind of uh baral Ceramics which are early Haren in date stylistically and interestingly a few Ceramics represent a new portal tradition which is not uh been previously reported from any other haran sites this is an interesting
• 17:30 - 18:00 evidence and Subways uh in the surrounding areas reveal more sites especially in this season uh Explorations reveal more number of sites having harapan U Ceramics showing at the sites that means these harapan settlements have been spreading around this the site of Guna and we look forward to uh post excavation analysis and continuing excavations in these newly identified
• 18:00 - 18:30 sites which can uh reveal more information about the harapan settlement history in the particular Western Cut region and uh now a lot of things are yet to come we are looking forward to uh see the results of post excavation analysis for that we have collected a lot of samples especially for aob Botanical Resorts and so soil micro morphology results and we are looking
• 18:30 - 19:00 for some ancient DNA sampling dental calculus is also sample and obviously currently we have sent uh with the help of our collaborators seven uh c14 samples hopefully we are uh expecting some uh results uh from these uh c14 dates these are very crucial for uh confirming the chronological identification that we tentatively made
• 19:00 - 19:30 based on the ceramic typology and I must acknowledge a lot of Institutions as listed here and a lot of people who have been contributing and Advising Us in in different ways and especially we are very much thankful to The Villages of Kya and laaper and The Villages they have been very much cooperative and uh they are uh behind the success of our excavations always and similarly our students from
• 19:30 - 20:00 the University of Kerala MSU Assumption College changanacheri in Kerala Central University of Karnataka kskv Kachi University all these students from these institutions have been part of this escavation and we are very thankful to the to all the students for making this u a fruitful season thank you for uh your attention thank you thank you so much Dr very interesting
• 20:00 - 20:30 and uh since this is I think your first season at uh this site at PARTA we will have to wait to learn more about it of course uh in the coming Seasons then right but uh just just a couple of um surface questions if I may word it that way the Eros that you mentioned at the
• 20:30 - 21:00 site uh would we be able to know if these are signs of flooding um no uh this erosion is probably not because of flooding the landscape is also like that I showed you the cond map the landscape is very slopy and it is easily easy to uh get eroded in a normal rain or in and it's physically also it can be
• 21:00 - 21:30 eroded because it is on the slope and one uh another thing is that there is a Road close to the site that means that road is slightly in a raised platform obviously for the construction of that road some of the uh soil has been taken from the surrounding areas and along with some of the land must have been stripped off from the uh downhill area
• 21:30 - 22:00 this is this is another assumption we make that's a sad thing I mean that does happen at so many sites of course starting from Hara itself yes yes of course it is a big issue of that is structure three that you mentioned the circular structure that you showed the stone circular uh wall um are you able to tell what it's purpose would have
• 22:00 - 22:30 been it should have been something like a small Hut even today Gujarat region especially the scat region has bnga kind of uh structures and this structure has one end having a kind of small opening that should be something like a doorway probably we only have one or two courses of that structure something was constructed upon that that we do not know maybe of perishable material roof
• 22:30 - 23:00 material of course would not may not have survived don't you then yeah yeah exactly by what we what we see today the circular hearts that we see today in C possibly the roof material may not survive in um archeaological yeah this should be for the for the habitation only for for the living purpose only we could identify some shell remains some pottery remain from within the structure as well as
• 23:00 - 23:30 from outside the structure okay so um have you had a chance to see uh reports of any other sites in cach if they have any kind of correlation cultur correlation with the pottery uh yes yeah for the potery yes some of the shapes are very very much identifiable they they belong to the typical late Haren kind of ceramics that
• 23:30 - 24:00 has been reported from other sides but a quite a good number of portraits are uh showing a quite different uh features like I mentioned that could be U part of a new uh ceramic tradition because of that those particular kind of uh shapes have not been reported from other harapan sit so far escalated all that we have done some consultation with the published work and
• 24:00 - 24:30 some of our teachers we consulted with them they also confirmed that this is these are the kind of new kind of a Ceramics that's very interesting I think that's something that we need here rajes is a ceramic expert and he can add some comments into that yes Dr rajes would you like
• 24:30 - 25:00 to actually I don't want to tell I think already told the things like that me Ceramics means some of the Ceramics are very much similar to the early harap Ceramics from the locality two from the locality one majority of the Ceramics looks like lateen and some Ceramics are mature Haren to so we have the another kind of vessel that is a very qu
• 25:00 - 25:30 kind of py and that was not reported from any of any other sites so it looks like a very different kind of tradition or or making technique so we need actually we need to do more drawings and other things to say exactly about the kind of similarities and differences yeah for the new site also then thank you so much for joining us for this presentation Dr abayan and uh thank you Dr Raj thank you Dr
• 25:30 - 26:00 Rajesh also for uh joining in it's been a pleasure thank you for joining us today if You' stayed on till the end then you have of course enjoyed the video I'm assuming here please do let us know on the like button also subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet done so and click on the Bell icon to receive all notifications for our videos this comes from YouTube at no
• 26:00 - 26:30 cost to you I'll see you soon again with another video