Evidence for Patterns of Selective Urban Migration in the Greater Indus Valley (2600-1900 BC): A Lead and Strontium Isotope Mortuary Analysis

PLOS ONE, Dec 2019

Just as modern nation-states struggle to manage the cultural and economic impacts of migration, ancient civilizations dealt with similar external pressures and set policies to regulate people’s movements. In one of the earliest urban societies, the Indus Civilization, mechanisms linking city populations to hinterland groups remain enigmatic in the absence of written documents. However, isotopic data from human tooth enamel associated with Harappa Phase (2600-1900 BC) cemetery burials at Harappa (Pakistan) and Farmana (India) provide individual biogeochemical life histories of migration. Strontium and lead isotope ratios allow us to reinterpret the Indus tradition of cemetery inhumation as part of a specific and highly regulated institution of migration. Intra-individual isotopic shifts are consistent with immigration from resource-rich hinterlands during childhood. Furthermore, mortuary populations formed over hundreds of years and composed almost entirely of first-generation immigrants suggest that inhumation was the final step in a process linking certain urban Indus communities to diverse hinterland groups. Additional multi disciplinary analyses are warranted to confirm inferred patterns of Indus mobility, but the available isotopic data suggest that efforts to classify and regulate human movement in the ancient Indus region likely helped structure socioeconomic integration across an ethnically diverse landscape.

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Evidence for Patterns of Selective Urban Migration in the Greater Indus Valley (2600-1900 BC): A Lead and Strontium Isotope Mortuary Analysis

April Evidence for Patterns of Selective Urban Migration in the Greater Indus Valley (2600- 1900 BC): A Lead and Strontium Isotope Mortuary Analysis Benjamin Valentine 0 1 George D. Kamenov 0 1 Jonathan Mark Kenoyer 0 1 Vasant Shinde 0 1 Veena Mushrif-Tripathy 0 1 Erik Otarola-Castillo 0 1 John Krigbaum 0 1 0 1 Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College , Hanover, NH , United States of America, 2 Department of Geological Sciences, University of Florida , Gainesville, FL , United States of America, 3 Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States of America, 4 Department of Archaeology, Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute , Pune, Maharashtra , India , 5 Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University , Cambridge, MA , United States of America, 6 Department of Anthropology, University of Florida , Gainesville, FL , United States of America 1 Academic Editor: John P. Hart, New York State Museum , UNITED STATES Just as modern nation-states struggle to manage the cultural and economic impacts of migration, ancient civilizations dealt with similar external pressures and set policies to regulate people's movements. In one of the earliest urban societies, the Indus Civilization, mechanisms linking city populations to hinterland groups remain enigmatic in the absence of written documents. However, isotopic data from human tooth enamel associated with Harappa Phase (2600-1900 BC) cemetery burials at Harappa (Pakistan) and Farmana (India) provide individual biogeochemical life histories of migration. Strontium and lead isotope ratios allow us to reinterpret the Indus tradition of cemetery inhumation as part of a specific and highly regulated institution of migration. Intra-individual isotopic shifts are consistent with immigration from resource-rich hinterlands during childhood. Furthermore, mortuary populations formed over hundreds of years and composed almost entirely of first-generation immigrants suggest that inhumation was the final step in a process linking certain urban Indus communities to diverse hinterland groups. Additional multi disciplinary analyses are warranted to confirm inferred patterns of Indus mobility, but the available isotopic data suggest that efforts to classify and regulate human movement in the ancient Indus region likely helped structure socioeconomic integration across an ethnically diverse landscape. - Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: Funding was provided by the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship to BV, JK (www.indiastudies.org), and Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant #8383 to BV, JK (www. wennergren.org). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Protohistoric South Asia holds unique insights into the evolution and maintenance of early urbanism, as the relatively decentralized Indus Civilization suggests an alternative to the strongly centralized states of contemporaneous Egypt and Mesopotamia [1]. Yet the institutional mechanisms Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. that structured Indus expansion in the late 3rd millennium BC remain unclear, in part because the Indus script is undeciphered. Fortunately, human tooth enamel provides a biogeochemical archive of past behavior and residence change that offers an alternative means of reconstructing ancient institutions [2]. The nature of the Indus skeletal record suggests that Indus cemetery inhumations are closely associated with the socio-political structures of the Harappa Phase (26001900 BC) and therefore provide a key source of isotopic data for understanding early urban mechanisms of interaction. Like standardized weights, measures, script, and stamp seals, a relatively homogenous tradition of cemetery inhumation endured for centuries, contemporaneous with the Indus urban florescence and cultural integration spanning ~680,000 km2 of northwest South Asia [3]. Though burials are geographically widespread, more than a century of excavation has yielded skeletal remains for only ca. 600 individuals [4]. Inhumations in formalized cemetery contexts are very rare, suggesting that cemetery populations represent a specific group distinct from the population-atlarge. In this work, we conducted lead (Pb) and strontium (Sr) isotopic analysis of human tooth enamel recovered from Harappa Phase cemeteries at Harappa, Pakistan [5] and Farmana, India [6] in order to assess the dynamics of migration and social identity for the buried individuals. We demonstrate how the isotopic data can be used to elucidate their distinctive social identity and propose that a specific, culturally regulated institution of migration helped to shape ancient urban-hinterland relationships. Indus Mortuary Practice in Context Though peoples of the Indus Tradition we (...truncated)


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Benjamin Valentine, George D. Kamenov, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Vasant Shinde, Veena Mushrif-Tripathy, Erik Otarola-Castillo, John Krigbaum. Evidence for Patterns of Selective Urban Migration in the Greater Indus Valley (2600-1900 BC): A Lead and Strontium Isotope Mortuary Analysis, PLOS ONE, 2015, Volume 10, Issue 4, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0123103