Stone Age farmers at Mehrgarh drilled living people's teeth
In a Neolithic graveyard in Balochistan, archaeologists found eleven molars from nine adults with holes drilled into them while their owners were still alive. Published in Nature in 2006, it was the oldest evidence of its kind, from a site that may be South Asia's earliest farming centre.
Mehrgarh lies on the Kacchi Plain near the Bolan Pass, west of the Indus River, between the Pakistani cities of Quetta, Kalat and Sibi. A French mission led by Jean-François and Catherine Jarrige found it in 1974 and dug there until 1986 and again from 1997 to 2000, recovering some 32,000 artefacts from six mounds. Its first inhabitants were semi-nomadic people who grew wheat and barley, kept sheep, goats and cattle, and lived in unbaked mud-brick houses usually divided into four rooms.
Dating has shifted. Jarrige originally put the earliest phase before 7000 BCE, but newer radiocarbon work on teeth by Mutin and Zazzo places Period I between 5250 and 4650 BCE, still before pottery was in use. Archaeologists split the site's life into eight periods. Later phases brought pottery, glazed beads, painted female figurines with elaborate hairstyles and, around 4000 BCE, Togau ware decorated with geometric patterns and already shaped on a potter's wheel. Sometime between 2600 and 2000 BCE the settlement was largely abandoned for Nausharo, a bigger fortified town five miles away.
The craft record is striking. A copper amulet shaped like a wheel, about 6,000 years old, is the oldest known object made by lost-wax casting, oddly in unalloyed copper, a method later dropped. The oldest ceramic figurines in South Asia also come from here and predate pottery itself. For a long time every figurine was female, many holding babies, and male figures only appear in Period VII.
Who the people of Mehrgarh were is debated. Some scholars see a farming package imported from the Near East, and Asko Parpola argues that its people later spread eastward and grew into the Bronze Age civilisation of the Indus. Jarrige insists the site had deep local roots and was no backwater of Near Eastern farming. Dental studies by Lukacs and Hemphill suggest cultural continuity but a change of population between the Neolithic and copper-using phases.
Source: Mehrgarh
