Rakhigarhi
Perhaps the largest Indus city, on the old Drishadvati plain east of the Punjab, whose skeletons gave the first Indus DNA.
Rakhigarhi lies on the plain of the dried Drishadvati and Ghaggar rivers in Haryana, a cluster of seven mounds that together may have covered as much as 350 hectares, which would make it the largest Harappan site known.
Excavations since the 1990s and in the 2010s found streets, drains, a brick-lined pit, workshops of carnelian and shell, a cemetery of over sixty graves, and seals.
In 2019 scientists published the genome of a woman buried at Rakhigarhi, the first ancient DNA from the Indus civilisation, showing ancestry from South Asian hunter-gatherers and early Iranian-related farmers.
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.
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.
Where farming began on the edge of the Indus plain, the deep root of the cities.