sketchbook, travels

Digging in Kutch

A couple of weeks ago the brown boy and I went to visit an excavation site in Kutch.
m0001We flew to Ahmedabad and then went on by road to Nakhatrana, a village in the Bhuj district.
The trip was organized by Anita and Udaya who run India Adventure Curry.
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The site was estimated to be from the Mature Harappan age, between 2700-2200 B.C. We learnt that it was probably a pit stop for travellers, who would come and stay for a few days, mostly with cattle, and would use a barter system to pay for goods and services.

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The team was quite small, a few Phd students and a few Archeology students. Here they are hard at work. This is Solmaz with the spade, who’s come from Iran
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And this is another student, Sutapa
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Archeology is an admirable profession, when viewed from up close.

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BB: So what will you do with all the antiquities that you’ve found?

P: Whatever we don’t need for our documentation we’ll bury it. So that in the distant future if anyone excavates it, they’ll learn about us…

EPILOGUE

I was reading Why be happy when you can be normal on this trip. And on P/114 J.W. writes (in a different context, but nevertheless) “Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there, bring back the things we need.”

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5 thoughts on “Digging in Kutch

  1. aditi roy ghatak says:

    This is absolutely fantastic. You should send it to the organisers for them to extract full value from this…

    Like

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