Mehrgarh
Where farming began on the edge of the Indus plain, the deep root of the cities.
At Mehrgarh, below the Bolan Pass, the French archaeologist Jean-François Jarrige from 1974 uncovered a village whose people were growing barley and wheat and herding goats, sheep and zebu cattle by around 7000 BCE, one of the earliest farming settlements in South Asia.
Its mud-brick houses and granaries grew over four thousand years; its people made beads of shell and lapis, wove cotton, and even drilled teeth with bow drills, the earliest dentistry known.
Mehrgarh shows that the Indus civilisation grew from local roots over millennia.
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.
The Indus city of the salt desert, with rock-cut reservoirs and a signboard of ten giant signs.
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.