Key Excavations of Early Historic Cities in India: Insights and Challenges

The early historic period in South Asia, roughly the middle of the first millennium BCE to the early centuries CE, witnessed the rise of fortified cities, organised craft production, and complex administration. Much of what we know about these urban centres comes not from texts but from the ground itself. Excavations at sites like Sisupalgarh, Indor Khera, and Bhita have slowly pieced together how people built, traded, governed, and lived. These digs also tell a second story: how archaeology itself matured from rough trenching into a careful, evidence-driven discipline. Understanding both stories helps explain why our picture of early urbanism is still being rewritten.

Major excavations and their findings 🔗

Each of these three sites was chosen by archaeologists for different reasons, and together they cover a wide range of what an early historic settlement could be: a heavily fortified regional capital, a modest craft-producing town, and one of the first ancient towns to be systematically explored.

Sisupalgarh: a fortified city in ancient Kalinga 🔗

Sisupalgarh, near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, is one of the most striking examples of early urban planning in the subcontinent. The city follows a roughly square plan enclosed by massive earthen ramparts, with eight symmetrically placed gateways and a perimeter wall running over a kilometre. Excavations first carried out by B.B. Lal in 1948, and revived by Rabindra Kumar Mohanty and Monica Smith in the 2000s, traced occupation from around the sixth century BCE to the fourth century CE. At its height the city may have supported a population in the tens of thousands.

The findings point to deliberate planning rather than organic sprawl. The ramparts were raised in stages, broad streets cut through the interior, and a cluster of standing stone pillars in the centre suggests a monumental public structure rather than ordinary housing. Rouletted Ware, a fine pottery type linked to long-distance exchange, along with evidence of coinage, indicates that Sisupalgarh was plugged into wider trade networks. The careful arrangement of gateways and reservoirs shows that water management and defence were planned together.

Indor Khera: a window into craft and household life 🔗

If Sisupalgarh shows the grand scale of fortification, Indor Khera in the upper Ganga plains of Uttar Pradesh shows the working life of an ordinary settlement. Excavations led by Jaya Menon and Supriya Varma in 2006 and 2007 deliberately targeted the edge of the mound, where they uncovered craft quarters dedicated to ceramic and terracotta production dating roughly between 200 BCE and 500 CE. This was significant because craft production in the early historic period had rarely been studied through its physical traces.

Instead of chasing isolated artefacts, the team documented the full chain of production: kilns, waste material, tools, and the layout of potters’ houses built from baked and mud bricks. Even small finds, such as crudely made miniature vessels, hinted that children may have learned the craft alongside adults. This kind of evidence allows archaeologists to reconstruct the crafting household as an economic and social unit, not just as a source of stray objects. Indor Khera reminds us that urbanism was sustained by everyday labour, and that the margins of a settlement can be as revealing as its monuments.

Bhita: the first serious dig of an ancient Indian town 🔗

Bhita, on the banks of the Yamuna near Prayagraj (Allahabad), holds a special place in this history. When John Marshall excavated it around 1909-10, he described the work as a new departure in Indian archaeology, because it was the first sustained attempt to explore the remains of an ancient town rather than a single temple or stupa. The dig exposed houses, lanes, and a layout that let researchers think about civic life as a whole.

Bhita is also famous for its seals and sealings, some of which carry names and symbols that scholars have used to study administration, commerce, and possibly trade guilds. These small clay objects functioned like signatures, marking ownership or authorising goods. By looking at an entire urban block instead of one structure, Marshall’s work at Bhita signalled a shift toward studying the early historic city as a living settlement.

Evolution of archaeological practices 🔗

The three sites span more than a century of fieldwork, and the differences in how they were dug reveal how much the discipline changed. Early Indian archaeology was shaped by colonial priorities, limited methods, and a fascination with monuments. Over time it became more systematic, more cautious, and more interested in ordinary life.

From monument-hunting to stratigraphy 🔗

The Archaeological Survey of India was founded by Alexander Cunningham in 1861, and its early decades focused heavily on identifying and conserving visible monuments. When Marshall led the Survey from 1902, he pushed for more careful exploration, and his Bhita work reflected that ambition. Yet even then, recording was often uneven, and excavators frequently dug downward in search of objects rather than reading the layers of soil for what they could reveal about sequence and change.

The decisive shift came with Mortimer Wheeler, who served as Director-General from 1944 to 1948. Wheeler is credited with placing scientific method at the centre of archaeology in the subcontinent, insisting that every layer be recorded before it was removed. He trained a generation of Indian archaeologists in disciplined observation, precise drawing, and problem-focused digging. Stratigraphy, the principle that soil deposits accumulate in a readable sequence, became the backbone of excavation. This made it possible to date structures relative to one another and to build reliable chronologies.

The rise of systematic surveys and careful recording 🔗

Wheeler also popularised a grid-based approach to digging. In the box-grid method, a site is divided into squares separated by standing walls of earth, allowing excavators to study the vertical layers in the sides while still exposing structures across an area. Though later refined and partly superseded, this approach instilled habits of control and record-keeping that endure.

More recent excavations push these habits further. At Sisupalgarh, the modern team used a Harris Matrix to map relationships between deposits and weighed pottery systematically rather than collecting only attractive pieces. At Indor Khera, horizontal exposure of houses and the documentation of production waste replaced the older focus on individual finds. Tools such as radiocarbon and luminescence dating now provide absolute ages, and aerial imagery and surface survey help locate and map sites before a single trench is opened. The emphasis has moved from extracting objects to reconstructing entire social and economic contexts.

Challenges and future directions 🔗

Despite real progress, the study of early historic urbanism still faces significant gaps. Many of these gaps stem from how the earliest excavations were conducted, and from constraints that continue to limit fieldwork today.

The limits of early excavations 🔗

Pioneers like Marshall and his contemporaries achieved a great deal, but their methods were a product of their time. Records were sometimes incomplete or later lost, dating was often based on guesswork, and the focus on imposing structures meant that craft areas, refuse zones, and humble dwellings were neglected. Because so much attention went to vertical digging, the horizontal spread of a settlement, which tells us how people organised space, frequently went unrecorded. Reinterpreting these old digs is difficult when the original documentation is thin.

What comprehensive studies could reveal 🔗

The path forward lies in broader, more contextual research. Regional surveys that map many sites together can show how cities related to their hinterlands, rather than treating each settlement in isolation. Studying craft waste, food remains, and ordinary households, as at Indor Khera, can illuminate the labour and economy that sustained urban life. There is also an urgent conservation dimension. Sites such as Sisupalgarh face pressure from urban expansion, encroachment, and agriculture, which can destroy evidence before it is studied. Protecting these landscapes and combining careful excavation with scientific dating and survey offers the best chance of understanding how, and why, early cities rose and changed.

What do you think? If the edge of a settlement, with its workshops and waste, can tell us as much as its grand walls and public buildings, how should archaeologists decide where to dig first? And as modern development encroaches on ancient sites, what responsibilities do we share in preserving the buried evidence of early urban life?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisupalgarh
2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/037698361003700201
3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-royal-asiatic-society/article/abs/vi-archaeological-exploration-in-india-190910/D778CF04F89299CEB562718B775B0E12
4. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mortimer-Wheeler
5. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803122022990
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Marshall_(archaeologist)