At Mehrgarh (Balochistan), early farming communities cultivated Southwest Asian domesticates—especially wheat and barley—and herded sheep/goats (and later cattle), marking one of South Asia’s earliest well-known agricultural traditions tied to the wider Indus cultural sphere.
During later Neolithic phases at Mehrgarh and neighboring settlements, pottery use and more intensive on-site storage/processing supported increasingly settled farming lifeways that fed into later regionalization across the Indus and adjacent zones.
In the Ravi Phase, early communities at Harappa used purpose-made storage pits and maintained food surpluses—an important foundation for later urban growth and larger-scale agricultural provisioning.
The Kot Diji (Early Harappan) phase saw expanding village and town networks and continued reliance on winter crops such as wheat and barley, setting the stage for integration into Mature Harappan urban economies.
Excavations at Kalibangan revealed a ploughed field with a grid of furrows, widely cited as direct archaeological evidence for organized field preparation and (likely) multi-cropping strategies in the Indus region.
Across the Mature Harappan period, archaeobotanical research indicates mixed cropping (winter and summer cultivation) and broad crop repertoires that supported large urban centers and craft-specialist populations.
Indus cities developed integrated water-management and sanitation infrastructures (wells, drains, and storage), enabling dense settlement and more reliable household/industrial water access beyond seasonal rainfall variability.
At Dholavira (Kutch), major reservoirs, channels, and water-harvesting works were constructed to capture storm runoff and manage scarcity in an arid environment—an unusually large civic investment in water storage.
Archaeobotanical syntheses from core and peripheral Indus regions show seasonal crop complements (winter and summer crops), indicating risk-spreading strategies and flexible scheduling within monsoon-driven environments.
Around ~4,200 years BP (often correlated with ~2200 BCE), climate stress is widely discussed as contributing to agricultural and settlement reorganization; evidence from some sites links increasing aridity to cropping changes and broader socio-economic decline signals.
At Khirsara and comparable sites in arid western regions, archaeobotanical evidence indicates an increased emphasis on drought-tolerant millets beginning around the ~4.2 ka aridity interval, interpreted as adaptation to reduced water availability.
From about 1900 BCE, major Indus urban centers declined and populations dispersed; farming systems increasingly emphasized local flexibility, with settlement and subsistence strategies reorganized under changing hydroclimate and river dynamics.
In parts of the Punjab and adjacent regions, Late Harappan cultural phases (including Cemetery H) continued into the second millennium BCE, indicating agricultural continuity alongside altered settlement scales and exchange networks.
By roughly 1300 BCE (regional and site-dependent), the Late Harappan sequence concludes in many chronologies, marking the end of the long Indus tradition as a distinct archaeological horizon while later cultural developments continue in South Asia.
Michael CarricoIndus Agricultural Practices and Crop Assemblages (Neolithic–Late Harappan, c. 7000–1300 BCE)