After an intensive post-war period of research in Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, and elsewhere, work in Pakistan focused on the Indus plains (Sindh, Punjab) and its fringes (Gomal, Bannu). Virtually all archaeological information on interior Baluchistan was collected between 1880 and 1965. Surveys conducted by A. Stein, B. de Cardi, W. A. Fairservice, R. Mughal, and others produced regional data sets that to date form the basis for settlement analyses, while soundings at Kile Ghul Mohammad (hereafter: KGM), Quetta, and Anjira provided a typological and comparative framework. R. Mughal’s restudy of this material supported the concept that an Early Harappan horizon existed in the Greater Indus Valley, thereby implying the autochthonous development of the Indus Civilization, notwithstanding interaction.
Research carried out in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and southeastern Iran, particularly excavations at Mundigak (J.-M. Casal), Bampur (B. de Cardi),
Tepe Yahya (C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky), Shahr-e Sokhta (M. Tosi), and Shahdad (A. Hakemi), widened cultural horizons and introduced new research perspectives. By 1970, the Indo-Iranian Borderlands had emerged as a region with distinctive cultural patterns and new models on human development and interaction were developed. Foreign fieldwork ended in 1978-79, but Iranian teams continued excavations and both Afghanistan and Iran have reopened their borders recently.
In Pakistan, the French Mission working in the Kacchi Plain at the foot of Bolan Pass proved the hypotheses of an indigenous cultural development in Pakistan and particularly in Baluchistan to be truer than anticipated. At Mehrgarh, Nausharo, Sibri, and Pirak, a sequence from the aceramic Neolithic Period through the first millennium BC excavated under the direction of J.-F. Jarrige, produced new sets of information that carried cultural complexes beyond Mere pottery styles and facilitated the development of a wider chronological scheme (Figure 2). In southern
Baluchistan, work was more limited and only now is the region gaining its proper place in history, mainly through the French Mission working in Makran since 1985 (R. Besenval, Miri Qalat, Shahi Tump, Dasht plain) and the German Mission to central (Sohr Damb/Nal) and southeastern Baluchistan, established in 1996-97.
This research is now gradually facilitating the building of models of past life on a more solid footing, but it also reveals the limits of such an endeavor: too many areas remain unexplored, too much information is inadequately published, and too many questions cannot be answered by the old data. However, no matter how much further information is needed, Baluchistan is crucial for understanding cultural development within the Indo-Iranian Borderlands until the abandonment of settled life in the second millennium BC and for assessing its role in the wider interaction spheres: was it a border, frontier, or an intermediary?
Figure 2 Mehrgarh: Bolan section with Neolithic levels (with J.-F. Jarrige, M. Tosi and M. Vidale). Photo: Ute Franke 1983. © 2008 Dr. Ute Franke-Vogt. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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