The economy of the Indus civilization was based on animal husbandry, particularly of zebu cattle, and on arable agriculture, growing cereals, pulses, and other plants. These were supplemented by the exploitation of wild resources, such as fish. Pastoralism and agriculture differed in their relative importance in each of the great diversity of environments that composed the Indus realms: In the valleys and plains of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers, their tributaries, and other smaller rivers mixed farming was highly profitable; rain and other local water resources also supported farming in other regions, such as Baluchistan, sometimes with the help of irrigation. Animals were taken at certain times of year to graze on the expanses of seasonal pastures in Gujarat and Punjab and in the uplands of Baluchistan. Coastal settlements took advantage of marine resources such as shellfish, which provided not only food but also shells, an important resource for making ornaments.
The archaeological evidence for Indus agriculture is extremely patchy. The preservation of plant remains is often poor, depending on local conditions, the type of plant, and chance. Whereas cereal cultivation has left evidence in the form of carbonized grain and impressions of stalks and grains in pottery and bricks, and pulses also preserve well, roots and tubers and many fruits and vegetables produce few or no hard parts that survive as archaeological traces, so evidence of their cultivation is rare. This problem is compounded by variations in the standards of recovery in archaeological excavations and by problems of identification. Animal bones, generally better preserved than plant remains and more frequently recovered from sites, also present identification problems: In addition to the well-known difficulties in distinguishing sheep from goats, Richard Meadow, a leading archaeozoologist, has drawn attention to the strong similarities, for example, between sheep/goat and blackbuck/gazelle, and among cattle, water buffalo, and nilgai (1996, 404). Evidence from the few sites that have well reported economic data cannot necessarily be regarded as representative of the Indus civilization as a whole, for reasons such as environmental differences. The picture of Harappan agriculture is therefore very fragmentary, having been put together from very restricted sources, filled out by comparison with traditional agricultural practices in the region.
Agriculture in the Mature Harappan period, as in its antecedent cultures in the Indo-Iranian borderlands, was based on wheat, barley, pulses, sheep, goats, and cattle, the same assemblage of crops and animals as the cultures to the west in the Iranian plateau, southern Central Asia, and West Asia, most of which had originally been domesticated in West Asia. Each region of Asia had other local plants and animals, notably zebu cattle in South Asia. With a few exceptions, such as sesame and cotton in South Asia, the crops followed a regime of autumn sowing and spring harvest across the entire region from Anatolia to central India: This is known as rabi cultivation in South Asia. Around the early second millennium, however, major new crops were added that required spring or summer sowing and autumn harvesting: kharif cultivation. These crops were to set the pattern for agriculture over much of the subcontinent in later times, although rabi crops have continued to dominate in the northwest, and in many regions both rabi and kharif crops are grown.
World History
