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SUMMARY:Influence of Himalayan river dynamics on the Bronze-age Indus Civi
 lisation in NW India - Prof. Sanjeev Gupta\, Imperial College London
DTSTART:20171107T120000Z
DTEND:20171107T130000Z
UID:TALK73217@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:37221
DESCRIPTION:Alluvial landscapes built by large perennial rivers form the e
 nvironmental templates on which the earliest urban societies nucleated. La
 rge-scale spatiotemporal settlement patterns in these societies are postul
 ated to have been influenced by river migration across alluvial floodplain
 s. During the early to mid-third millennium BCE\, the Indus Civilisation d
 eveloped one of the most extensive urban cultures in the Old World. This c
 ivilisation was established on the alluvial plains of the Indo-Gangetic ba
 sin in northwestern India and Pakistan\, with an urban phase commencing ~4
 .6-4.5 ka B.P. It was contemporaneous with and more extensive in area than
  the earliest urban societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia\, encompassing an a
 rea estimated at ~1 million km2. Urbanism here has been linked to water re
 sources provided by large Himalayan river systems\, however the largest co
 ncentrations of urban-scale Indus settlements are located far from extant 
 Himalayan rivers. Why numerous Indus settlements should have been located 
 in a region now devoid of large perennial rivers has been the subject of v
 igorous debate and controversy. \n	\nIn this talk\, I present geological d
 ata to resolve the long-standing issue of the drainage evolution of rivers
  on the northwestern Ganges Plains by characterising the nature of late Qu
 aternary fluvial deposition\, up to and including the time of Indus Civili
 sation urbanisation. Using optically-stimulated luminescence chronologies\
 , and U-Pb detrital zircon and Ar-Ar mica provenance fingerprinting\, we c
 onstrain the timing and sources of the fluvial deposits. When dove-tailed 
 with sedimentological analysis\, our results demonstrate how river morphod
 ynamics influenced Indus settlement patterns albeit in a counterintuitive 
 fashion.\n
LOCATION:Tilley Lecture Theatre\, Department of Earth Sciences\, Downing S
 ite
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