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Intensified summer monsoon and the urbanization of Indus Civilization in northwest India

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Date
09/03/2018
Author
Dixit, Yama
Hodell, David A.
Giesche, Alena
Tandon, Sampat K.
Gázquez, Fernando
Saini, Hari S.
Skinner, Luke C.
Mujtaba, Syed A. I.
Pawar, Vikas
Singh, Ravindra N.
Petrie, Cameron A.
Keywords
GE Environmental Sciences
NDAS
SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities
SDG 13 - Climate Action
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Abstract
Today the desert margins of northwest India are dry and unable to support large populations, but were densely occupied by the populations of the Indus Civilization during the middle to late Holocene. The hydroclimatic conditions under which Indus urbanization took place, which was marked by a period of expanded settlement into the Thar Desert margins, remains poorly understood. We measured the isotopic values (δ18O and δD) of gypsum hydration water in paleolake Karsandi sediments in northern Rajasthan to infer past changes in lake hydrology, which is sensitive to changing amounts of precipitation and evaporation. Our record reveals that relatively wet conditions prevailed at the northern edge of Rajasthan from ~5.1 ± 0.2 ka BP, during the beginning of the agricultural-based Early Harappan phase of the Indus Civilization. Monsoon rainfall intensified further between 5.0 and 4.4 ka BP, during the period when Indus urban centres developed in the western Thar Desert margin and on the plains of Haryana to its north. Drier conditions set in sometime after 4.4 ka BP, and by ~3.9 ka BP an eastward shift of populations had occurred. Our findings provide evidence that climate change was associated with both the expansion and contraction of Indus urbanism along the desert margin in northwest India.
Citation
Dixit , Y , Hodell , D A , Giesche , A , Tandon , S K , Gázquez , F , Saini , H S , Skinner , L C , Mujtaba , S A I , Pawar , V , Singh , R N & Petrie , C A 2018 , ' Intensified summer monsoon and the urbanization of Indus Civilization in northwest India ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 8 , 4225 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22504-5
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22504-5
ISSN
2045-2322
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
The work was initiated under the Land, Water and Settlement project (http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/land-water-settlement) and continued under the ERC-funded TwoRains project (http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/two-rains). The analyses were supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/H011463/1) grant and the ERC Water Isotopes in Hydrated Minerals Project (WIHM#339694) to DAH. YD was supported by the Gates Cambridge Trust (University of Cambridge, UK) and Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship (Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/13023

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