The marked heterogeneity of some aspects of Harappan life, including such fundamental matters as religion, probably owes much to the diversity of cultural backgrounds from which its people sprang. In the centuries before the emergence of the civilization, these included indigenous hunter-gatherers and fishers, farmers and pastoralists of local stock, and others whose ancestors came from the Indo-Iranian borderlands, as well as those who still had their homes in the latter region. Differences in artifacts suggest that there were a number of distinct cultures within each of these broad economic and ethnic groupings. The universal adoption of the overarching Harappan ideology, most clearly shown by the widespread move during the Transition period to settlements constructed according to new principles, masks much of this heterogeneous background, but features of the regional groups that emerged after the collapse of Harappan urban culture in the early second millennium suggest that perceptions of ethnic and cultural identity were not entirely submerged by the shared experience of being Harappan during the Mature Indus period. Identifying ethnic groups has relied heavily on the indirect evidence from material culture. In Saurashtra various features including the pottery repertoire, which lacked many classic Harappan vessel forms, such as S-profile jars, and included distinctive local types, such as stud-handled bowls, led Possehl to identify a local variation of Indus culture which he called Sorath Harappan. A similar situation existed in the east where Sothi-Siswal pottery was used from the Early Harappan to the Posturban period and alongside Harappan pottery in the Mature Harappan period.
In the past many studies of human remains made broad racial attributions on the basis of a few physical features, such as skull shape; these gave too much weight to differences between populations and too little to the range of variation within them, producing results that had little meaning. In recent decades, however, much more sophisticated ways of assessing ethnic makeup have been developed, including genetics.
Studies of Harappan and other Indian skeletal material by Kennedy and others have yielded interesting results. The people buried in the cemetery at Lothal show a considerable degree of affinity to the local hunter-gatherer population: This would seem to fit with the deduction from artifactual evidence that the indigenous population of Gujarat had formed part of Harappan society since Early Harappan times. Regional diversity also characterizes the remains from Ropar and Kalibangan. Nevertheless, the human remains from Harappan sites exhibit a high degree of close biological affinity, showing that the members of the Harappan population were interrelated. The exception is Mohenjo-daro, where the human remains, which come from the late period of urban occupation, were significantly different and displayed a considerable degree of variability among themselves.
Genetic studies on the people buried at Harappa revealed that, while no strong genetic links existed among the men, the women displayed considerable similarities, indicating that many were related. This would seem to indicate that the marriage pattern in Harappan society was matrilocal, the man coming to live with his wife's family upon marriage and women continuing to live in or near their ancestral homes throughout their lives. Further studies are required to test whether this pattern was widespread.
World History
