Mehrgarh: Early Farming Village of Neolithic South Asia

Mehrgarh is a prehistoric settlement on the Kachi Plain of Balochistan, Pakistan, where people began farming, herding and building mud-brick villages from around 7000 BC. Excavated by French archaeologists from 1974, it is one of the earliest known farming sites in South Asia. Its long sequence, running to about 2600 BC, shows how agriculture, crafts and trade developed over thousands of years before the cities of the Indus Valley appeared.

Background: farming on the edge of the Indus world

For much of the 20th century, scholars assumed that farming reached South Asia late and from outside, perhaps carried from Mesopotamia or Iran. Very little was known about what came before the great Indus cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, which flourished from about 2600 BC. Mehrgarh changed that picture by showing a farming tradition in the region that was already thousands of years old.

The site lies at the foot of the Bolan Pass, one of the main routes between the Indus lowlands and the highlands of Balochistan, Afghanistan and eastern Iran. The Bolan River provided water, and the alluvial plain offered fertile soils. The climate was hot and dry, much as it is today, so early farmers depended on the river and seasonal floods.

Mehrgarh belongs to a wider belt of early farming in south-west Asia. Its crops and animals overlap with those of the Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent, but it also shows distinctly local developments, especially in cattle herding.

Discovery and excavation

The site was identified in 1974 by the French Archaeological Mission to Pakistan, led by Jean-François Jarrige and Catherine Jarrige, working with Pakistan’s Department of Archaeology. Floods on the Bolan River had cut into the ground and exposed ancient layers, which helped the team see a very deep sequence of occupation.

Excavations continued until 1986 and resumed from 1997 to 2000. The American zooarchaeologist Richard H. Meadow studied the animal bones, while botanists, physical anthropologists and other specialists studied plant remains, burials and artefacts. Mehrgarh is not one mound but a series of settlement areas spread over roughly two square kilometres, because the village shifted its position over the millennia.

Archaeologists divide the occupation into seven main periods. Period I is the aceramic, or pre-pottery, Neolithic. Periods II and III see pottery, more crafts and copper. Later periods, up to Period VII, take the story into the early 3rd millennium BC.

The first farmers: Period I

The earliest layers, usually dated to c. 7000–5500 BC, show a village of small rectangular houses built of hand-shaped mud bricks. Some houses were divided into four or more small rooms. Alongside them stood larger buildings divided into small cells without doors, which archaeologists interpret as storerooms for grain.

The plant remains show that farmers grew barley, mostly a naked six-row variety, together with smaller amounts of einkorn, emmer and other wheats. They also gathered wild fruit such as jujube and dates. These crops broadly match the cereal package known from the domestication of wheat and barley farther west, although some scholars argue that barley may have been domesticated locally as well.

At first, hunted animals such as gazelle, wild sheep and wild cattle were important. Over the course of Period I, the bones show a steady shift towards domestic goats, sheep and cattle. The cattle were mostly zebu, the humped species of South Asia. Their growing importance and decreasing size have led many researchers to see the Mehrgarh area as one of the places where zebu were domesticated, a development separate from the taurine cattle of the Near East discussed in the domestication of cattle.

Burials, ornaments and long-distance trade

The people of Mehrgarh buried their dead in cemeteries between the houses. Bodies were usually laid on their sides in a flexed position, often sprinkled with red ochre. Many graves contained goods such as stone tools, baskets coated with bitumen, and young goats placed at the feet of the dead.

Ornaments reveal remarkably wide contacts. Burials included beads of lapis lazuli, which probably came from Badakhshan in north-east Afghanistan, and turquoise likely from Iran or Central Asia. Marine shells came from the Arabian Sea coast, several hundred kilometres to the south. These finds show that even early farming villages were part of exchange networks across a very large area.

Metal appears very early. A single copper bead from a Period I burial is among the oldest metal objects in South Asia. Inside one copper bead from a 6th-millennium BC grave, researchers in 2002 found mineralised plant fibres identified as cotton, the earliest known evidence of cotton use in the Old World.

Prehistoric dentistry

Mehrgarh became famous in 2006 when a team led by Andrea Coppa reported drilled human teeth in the journal Nature. They found 11 drilled molar crowns from nine adults buried in a Neolithic cemetery dated to about 7,500 to 9,000 years ago.

The holes were smooth, roughly conical and only a few millimetres across. Wear on the edges showed that the people continued to chew after the drilling, so the work was done on living individuals. The researchers suggested that small bow drills tipped with flint, of the kind used to make beads at the site, were used. Four of the drilled teeth also showed decay linked to the cavity, which suggests the work may have been meant to treat it.

No filling material survived, and the evidence ends after a few generations. Even so, it is the earliest known evidence of deliberate drilling of human teeth, a practice that shows both skill and a willingness to treat pain.

Skeletons from the cemeteries give a picture of hard working lives. Many adults show wear on joints and teeth from grinding grain on stone querns, and dental decay increased as people ate more cereal-based food. This change in diet, seen at many early farming sites around the world, may help explain why dental treatment was attempted at all.

The village economy combined several activities. Families cultivated fields along the river, kept flocks on the surrounding plain and hills, made tools from local flint, and obtained exotic stones and shells through exchange. Grain stored in the cellular buildings probably served as a buffer against bad harvests, an early sign of planning for the future that would become central to later Indus towns.

Pottery, crafts and growth: Periods II–VII

Pottery appeared around 5500 BC, at first simple and handmade. In the following millennia the craft became highly developed, with wheel-made vessels painted in bold geometric patterns and, later, animals. Distinct styles of Mehrgarh pottery were traded or copied across Balochistan.

Other crafts grew too. Workshops produced beads of stone, shell and bone, and from about the 5th millennium BC there is evidence of copper working, including crucibles. Terracotta figurines, especially seated female figures with elaborate hairstyles and ornaments, became common in the later periods. Cotton and new crops, such as further varieties of wheat, appear in the record, and irrigation was probably used to extend farming.

By the 4th millennium BC Mehrgarh was a sizeable village in a region of many similar communities. Around 2600 BC the site was abandoned. Occupation continued at nearby Nausharo, which became part of the Indus world, so the move may have been a relocation rather than a collapse.

Mehrgarh and the Indus civilisation

Mehrgarh was not an Indus city, and it ended before the mature Indus Valley Civilisation reached its height. Its importance lies in showing the long local roots of that civilisation. Mud-brick building, storage of grain, cattle herding, bead-making, copper working and long-distance trade were all present in the region thousands of years before Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.

This evidence undermined older theories that the Indus cities were created mainly by migrants or influences from Mesopotamia. Most archaeologists now see the Indus civilisation as growing out of a long sequence of village farming in Balochistan and the Indus borderlands, with Mehrgarh as its best-studied early example.

Some questions remain. The exact start date of Period I is debated, as radiocarbon samples from the earliest layers are few. The degree to which crops and animals were domesticated locally, rather than introduced, is also still discussed.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 7000 BC: First farming village founded on the Kachi Plain, with mud-brick houses and barley cultivation.
• c. 7000–5500 BC: Period I; shift from hunting to herding of goats, sheep and zebu cattle; drilled teeth in the cemetery.
• c. 5500 BC: Pottery appears, marking the start of Period II.
• c. 5th millennium BC: Copper working and larger craft production develop.
• c. 4th millennium BC: Wheel-made painted pottery and terracotta figurines become common.
• c. 2600 BC: Mehrgarh is abandoned; nearby Nausharo continues into the Indus period.
• 1974: French and Pakistani archaeologists identify the site after river erosion exposes its layers.
• 2004: The site is placed on Pakistan’s tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage status.
• 2006: Evidence of Neolithic dentistry at Mehrgarh is published in Nature.

Why it matters

Mehrgarh showed that South Asia had its own early farming tradition, beginning around 7000 BC and lasting for more than four thousand years. Its houses, burials, crafts and teeth reveal communities that farmed, herded, traded and even treated toothache long before writing existed. It remains the key site for understanding where the Indus civilisation came from.