Cist burial

The funerary or sepulchral architecture of Dholavira is unique in several ways. To the west of the Harappan settlement lay its cemetery, covering a large area. In the cemetery were cist burials that included simple cists, a cist in a cairn circle, a circle or a half-circle containing several graves.

No grave had any skeleton but they had grave goods, especially pottery. “The graves were symbolic. They were memorial graves,” said Professor R.S. Bisht, who led the Archaeological Survey of India's excavations for 13 field seasons from 1990 to 2005 at Dholavira.

In addition, the ASI found seven semi-circular or hemispherical graves, two of which it excavated. They were made of bricks, circular in shape, and built over large rock-cut chambers. While one structure was in the form of a spoked wheel, another had no spokes.

One of the chambers yielded a lot of ritual pottery, which were not arranged in an orderly manner. It also yielded a complete necklace made of beads of steatite strung on a copper wire with a hook on either end, a solid gold bangle resembling a peepal leaf, and so on.

Speaking about the spoked wheel design and graves in the shape of an unspoked wheel, Bisht quoted from the Satapatha Brahmana and the Sulba Sutras (later Vedic texts) to point out that such graves were mentioned in these texts.

Referring to the cist burials, Bisht said: “There are graves at Dholavira that are prototypes of megalithic tombs. They suggest that the roots of the megalithic tombs are not outside India but within India. How the tradition travelled to South India needs investigation.”

Bisht, alluding to claims made by some historians that horse bones had been found at some of the Harappan sites, said no horse bones had been found at Dholavira.

T.S. Subramanian