Dholavira
The Indus city of the salt desert, with rock-cut reservoirs and a signboard of ten giant signs.
Dholavira stands on the island of Khadir in the Rann of Kutch. To survive in a land of little rain, its people cut huge reservoirs into the rock and built dams and channels to catch every monsoon flood.
The city had a citadel, a middle town and a lower town, all walled, and a great open ground perhaps used for ceremonies. At a gateway of the citadel lay the remains of a signboard of ten large signs of the Indus script inlaid in white gypsum, the largest Indus inscription known.
It was excavated by R. S. Bisht from 1990 and became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.
More from the Indus
The type site of the civilisation, on an old course of the Ravi: 150 hectares and perhaps 23,500 people at its height.
The largest and best-preserved Indus city, 'the mound of the dead', with the Great Bath and some seven hundred wells.
Perhaps the largest Indus city, on the old Drishadvati plain east of the Punjab, whose skeletons gave the first Indus DNA.
A small port town near the Gulf of Khambhat with a great brick basin, a bead factory and an ivory scale.
The town of 'black bangles' on the dry Ghaggar, with the oldest ploughed field ever excavated and rows of fire altars.
Indian Punjab's own Indus town, on the Sutlej where it leaves the Shivalik hills.
Where farming began on the edge of the Indus plain, the deep root of the cities.