Archaeological Surveys and Excavations of Early Historic Urban Centres in North India

How do we know that cities like Kausambi and Pataliputra were once thriving urban centres more than two thousand years ago? The answer lies in two complementary tools of archaeology: surveys that map settlements across a landscape, and excavations that dig into a single site to reveal its layers. The study of Early Historic urban centres in north India, which flourished from around the sixth century BCE, depends heavily on both methods. Together they tell us how villages grew into towns, how towns grew into cities, and what these cities actually contained. Yet the picture remains incomplete, partly because of the nature of the sites themselves and partly because of how they were dug. This post explains how archaeologists approach these cities, what the major excavations have revealed, and why so many questions remain unanswered.

Settlement pattern studies: reading the landscape 🔗

Before digging into any single mound, archaeologists often step back and study an entire region. Settlement pattern studies map all the ancient sites across a defined area and compare their sizes. The logic is straightforward: a region with one very large site, a few medium-sized towns, and many small villages reflects a hierarchy. That hierarchy is itself evidence of urbanisation, because cities do not exist in isolation. They sit at the top of a network of smaller settlements that supply food, labour, and goods.

This approach marked a shift away from older methods. Earlier scholars often treated cities as a checklist of traits, such as fortifications or coinage, and tried to explain their rise by pointing to a single cause like trade or administration. George Erdosy argued instead that cities should be seen as participants in a wider process of social change, where a change in one part of society affects all others. Studying the relationships between settlements, rather than listing the features of one city, gives a more honest account of how urban life emerged.

Erdosy’s survey of the middle Ganga valley 🔗

The most influential example of this method in north India is Erdosy’s survey of the Allahabad district in Uttar Pradesh, in the territory around the ancient city of Kausambi. His was the first detailed survey for that district and built on the emphasis of processual archaeology, which tries to understand change and growth within and between sites rather than simply describing them.

Erdosy organised the growth of settlements in the region into a sequence of chronological periods, tracking how the number, size, and ranking of sites changed over time. In the earliest phase, settlements were few and roughly similar in size. Over successive periods, a clear hierarchy appeared: a small number of large centres emerged above many smaller villages, with Kausambi rising to dominate the region. Kausambi eventually became the capital of the Vatsa mahajanapada, developed a range of craft specialisations, and supported smaller satellite centres that provided specialised services. This layering of settlements, from the capital down to the village, is exactly what a settlement hierarchy looks like, and it is one of the strongest signs that genuine urbanisation had taken place.

It is worth noting that the survey covered the lower part of the Gangetic system rather than the whole of north India. Its great value lies in the method: by measuring sites against one another, it shows the rise of urbanism as a gradual regional process, not a sudden event at a single spot. The Arthashastra of Kautilya even described an idealised version of such a hierarchy, with one central city, a tier of secondary towns, further lower-level towns, and hundreds of villages at the base. Settlement surveys allow archaeologists to test how far reality matched that ideal model.

Excavated sites: digging into the cities 🔗

Surveys tell us where the cities were and how they ranked. To learn what they contained, archaeologists must excavate. Several Early Historic centres have been dug over the past century, and four stand out for the scale and influence of their excavations: Taxila, Kausambi, Mathura, and Pataliputra.

Taxila 🔗

Taxila, in present-day Pakistan, is one of the two regions where Early Historic urbanisation developed, the other being the Ganga-Yamuna doab. The site is actually a series of cities built one after another. The earliest of the main urban mounds is Bhir Mound, which Sir John Marshall excavated between 1913 and 1925. Recent work by the Punjab Department of Archaeology has revealed narrow lanes, houses, grain storage areas, and wells, suggesting a city that grew organically rather than to a fixed plan. Later, the Bactrian Greeks built a new city to the north at Sirkap, laid out on a grid pattern, and still later came Sirsukh. The successive cities grew in size over time, with Bhir Mound around 70 hectares, Sirkap nearly 78 hectares, and Sirsukh roughly 137 hectares.

Taxila also illustrates a recurring limitation. Marshall’s interest lay mainly in monumental remains and Buddhist establishments, so not all of the cities could be fully excavated. The earliest occupation at the nearby Hathial ridge remains only partly understood, leaving gaps in our knowledge of how the very first settlement here began.

Kausambi 🔗

Kausambi, on the left bank of the Yamuna near Allahabad, was excavated by Allahabad University under G. R. Sharma from the 1940s into the 1960s. The work brought to light a main road near an Asokan pillar, residential complexes, a Buddhist monastery identified as the Ghoshitarama, a stone fortress in the southwestern corner, and an extensive rampart that encircled the city except where the river formed a natural barrier.

The defences were especially important. Sharma identified several phases of the rampart, beginning with rammed clay and later rebuilt in successive stages, with multiple road levels leading up to it. Yet Kausambi also became a famous case of how excavation results can be disputed. Sharma dated the massive clay rampart to around 1025 BCE, but B. B. Lal and others questioned this dating, pointing to an unrecognised foundation trench and arguing that a stone structure Sharma read as an ancient palace might actually be far more recent. These debates show that excavation is only the beginning; interpreting what is dug up is a separate and often contested task.

Mathura 🔗

Mathura, also on the Yamuna, is best known as a great art centre, but it was a substantial Early Historic city as well. Its earliest settlement sits on the riverbank in the form of lofty mounds and dates back to the Painted Grey Ware period, with the city’s first major extension occurring in the Northern Black Polished Ware times that partly overlap with the Mauryan period. An inner fortification with semi-circular bastions and a moat was built in the area of the Katra mound.

Mathura highlights a different problem: the modern city has expanded so heavily over the ancient one that tracing the old fortified city is now extremely difficult. Ancient mounds survive only in patches, many under temples or threatened by construction, and detailed records of some excavations were never properly published. The result is a fragmented picture assembled from scattered find-spots rather than a clear plan of the whole city.

Pataliputra 🔗

Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital near modern Patna, is described in literary sources such as the account of the Greek ambassador Megasthenes, who portrayed a large city protected by a timber palisade and a moat. Archaeology has confirmed parts of this picture. At Bulandi Bagh, excavators uncovered massive wooden palisades believed to have formed the city’s defensive wall, with later work by the Archaeological Survey of India exposing a long stretch of these timber structures. At nearby Kumrahar, excavations revealed a large pillared hall of polished sandstone, traced through the pits left where its columns once stood, which gave the structure its name as the hall of eighty pillars.

Pataliputra also shows how slow and partial the recovery of a buried city can be. The capital lies beneath a living, water-logged city, so excavators could reach only small windows of the ancient remains. The wooden palisade and the pillared hall are remarkable finds, but they are fragments, and the full layout of the Mauryan capital is still far from clear.

Challenges in the archaeology of Early Historic cities 🔗

A striking paradox runs through this whole subject. Many Early Historic urban centres in north India have been excavated, yet we know far less about them than about the much older Harappan cities. The reason is not a lack of digging but the nature of that digging.

Vertical versus horizontal excavation 🔗

Archaeologists use two broad strategies. Vertical excavation digs a deep but narrow trench downward through the layers of a site, revealing its chronological sequence, which culture came when. Horizontal excavation opens up a wide area at one level to expose how the settlement was organised in space, showing the relationships between houses, streets, and workshops. As an overview of excavation methods explains, the best results usually come from combining both, using trenches to establish the time sequence and then opening broad areas at key levels.

The trouble is that most Early Historic urban sites in north India were dug mainly through vertical trenches. This tells us the sequence of occupation, but it reveals very little about the plan and structure of the city as a whole. Without enough horizontal excavation, we cannot easily see how neighbourhoods were laid out, how large the city actually was at any one moment, or how its different parts functioned together. Sites elsewhere, such as Sisupalgarh in eastern India, where excavators dug down to natural soil across several areas, show how much more can be learned when methods are varied.

Outdated methods and poor documentation 🔗

Many of the influential excavations were carried out decades ago, when techniques were less refined and recording standards differed from those used today. Findings were sometimes published incompletely, or not at all, which is why the work at sites like Mathura is so hard to reconstruct. Where documentation is thin, later researchers cannot fully re-examine the evidence, and disagreements like the dating dispute at Kausambi become almost impossible to settle.

There is also the simple problem that several of these cities lie beneath modern towns. At Pataliputra and Mathura, present-day construction sits directly on top of the ancient remains, restricting where archaeologists can dig and how much they can expose. Combined with the early focus on monumental and religious structures rather than ordinary residential areas, this leaves us with an uneven and partial understanding of Early Historic urban life.

Why all this matters 🔗

Surveys and excavations are not rival methods but two halves of a single enquiry. Settlement surveys show the broad pattern, how a landscape filled with villages developed a hierarchy crowned by cities. Excavations reveal the texture of those cities, their ramparts, roads, monasteries, and halls. The gaps in our knowledge come less from any shortage of sites than from how they were studied: too much vertical trenching, too little horizontal exposure, ageing methods, incomplete records, and modern cities sitting on ancient ones. Recognising these limits is itself valuable, because it tells future archaeologists exactly where the work still needs to be done.

What do you think? If most Early Historic cities have only been dug in narrow trenches, how much of our confident picture of ancient urban life rests on guesswork rather than evidence? And when modern towns sit directly above ancient capitals, how should archaeologists balance the value of new excavation against the needs of the people living there today?

References

1. https://os.pennds.org/archaeobib_filestore/pdf_articles/JEconSocHistOrient/1985_28_1_Erdosy.pdf
2. https://www.academia.edu/110248897/Urbanisation_in_Early_Historic_India_By_George_Erdosy_BAR_International_Series_430_Oxford_BAR_International_1988_iv_211_pp
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhir_Mound
4. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2583624/excavations-at-taxilas-bhir-mound-reveal-traces-of-ancient-city-before-6th-century-bc
5. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/44407/1/Unit-14.pdf
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352226723000028
7. https://theprint.in/opinion/excavation-just-beginning-complex-sites-kaushambi-need-evidence-based-approach/2596719/
8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285619137_Archaeological_Landscape_of_Ancient_Mathura_in_Relation_to_Its_Art_Workshops
9. http://saveancientindiansites.blogspot.com/2013/12/5-mathura-piecing-together-vestiges-of.html
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulandi_Bagh
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumhrar
12. https://www.academia.edu/70896702/Unit_10_Archaeology_of_the_Early_Historic_Urban_Centres_in_North_India_Emergence_and_Characteristics
13. https://fiveable.me/introduction-archaeology/unit-4/excavation-methods-strategies/study-guide/UAC2vC3GHuWzy4Lx