Kuntasi- A Harappan Emporium on West Coast (An Old and Rare Book)

Foreword It is with great pleasure that we are presenting the report on Kuntasi Excavations which was jointly carried out by this Institute in collaboration with the State Department of Archaeology. Gujarat. For a long time the Institute was hoping to excavate a Harappan site but could not do so because we were busy with excavations at Inamgaon. Much earlier, in 1945, the Institute undertook excavations at the Harappan site of Rangpur in Gujarat under the direction of the late Dr. M.G. Dikshit. Since then we were in search of a sizable Harappan settlement. When the ancient site of Kuntasi was brought to our notice, we planned to excavate it on a large scale.

Preface For a long time we were thinking of excavating a Harappan site, not because of the glamour that is associated with the Indus civilization, but because we wanted to apply to it the latest scientific techniques of data recovery and interpretation which we had found to be of great value in our excavations at Inamgaon. But we were busy at Inamgaon for thirteen seasons. between 1968 to 1983 and hardly had any time to achieve our objective. Kuntasi was explored by Shri Y. M.Chitalwala in 1972 when he was a research scholar at Deccan College, and we had thought of excavation, but could do so only after we completed the Inamgoon excavation and the full report on it. At Kuntasi we started the excavation from 1987 and continued it for three successive seasons. The excavation was carried out in collaboration with Gujarat State Department of Archaeology which was represented at the site in all the three seasons by Shri Y. M. Chitalwala, Superintending Archaeologist, Rajkot Circle.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages