Archaeologists use various methods for finding out how old various settlements are. Let us see how Marshall concluded that the Harappan civilization was About Indus valley five thousand years old and not one thousand years old, as believed by Cunningham. Marshall found that the seals, sealings, written script and works of art found in Harappa were totally different from those with which scholars were already familiar and which belonged to a much later period. Similar finds were reported in another place called Mohenjodaro in Sind. In Mohenjodaro the settlement lay underneath a Buddhist monastery belonging to the Kushan period. It has been found that in ancient times if a house was destroyed for some reason people would generally use the brick or mud of the house to prepare a plinth and make another house on top of it. Thus, if an archaeologist excavates an area and finds remains of a house beneath another house, he can figure out that the one below is older than the one above. That is why the deeper he digs the earlier he moves in the time scale. Thus, Marshall could find out that the houses $low the Buddhist monastery must have been older than the Kushan period. Then, there was the evidence that people living in these settlements did not know the use of iron. This meant that these cities were part of an age when iron was unknown. Iron came in use in the beginning of the second millennium B.C. Mesopotamian cities came into existence in the early 3rd millennium B.C. Thus, if anything Harappan was discovered in the ancient cities of Mesopotamia it would indicate that the people of Harappa lived at the same time. With these evidences scholars could figure out that the conclusions of the local population and Cunningham were incorrect. Marshall’s chronology of Harappa has been further supported by new methods of dating, such as Radio carbon dating. Thus, scholars accept the following chronology for the Pre-Harappan and Harappan cultures.
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begins with the discovery of Harappa and history of India, nearly thousand settlements having similar traits have been discovered. Scholars named it the ‘Indus Valley Civilization’ because initially most of the settlements were discovered in the plains of the river Indus and its tributaries. Archaeologists however prefer, to call it the ‘Harappan Civilization’. This is because in archaeology there is a convention that when an ancient culture is described, it is named after the modem name of the site which first revealed the existence of this culture. We do not know what those people called themselves because we have not been able to read their writing. Thus, we call them Harappans after the modern place Harappa where the evidence of this forgotten civilization was first unearthed in our times.