 Hello and welcome to a new clip today in Talking Science in Tech. We are joined by Prabir Prakash and we will be looking at the results of a recent study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science on the food habits of the people living in Indus Valley civilization and what this study has found is that the people in the ancient South Asia consumed a wide variety of meats and to talk more on this study we have Prabir. So Prabir, can you tell us about the results, the larger results of this study? What we see is over a large area which is the Harappan settlements from Erni what is called the mature Harappan when you have the urban centers which come up and then the late Harappan when you see the decline of the urban civilization over there and you get dispersed rural settlements in the region. All of this seemed to show that people ate meat in all over the area. The culinary habits seems to have been similar, of course there must have been variations within this but the kind of food they ate and the kind of cooking methods they used is roughly similar and it is similar also between the rural areas and the urban areas even the modes of preparation seem to be largely similar. So that is an interesting development because you would expect that there might be within this area large amount of regional variations as well but that is not there. So this is something we have commented about Harappan civilization, Harappan settlements earlier that there was a very large kind of uniformity across this area, across the civilizations which we found from not only the seeds of course which is widely known but also from the fact that the weights and measures were similar across a very large area. Now and it wasn't one empire that we can see but it seemed to be there was a uniformity across this region and as I said in terms of ancient antiquity and this is an old civilization one of the old days that this uniformity would seem to show something held this cultural space together and it's argued that it could be perhaps not a centralized empire but also a religious identity of some kind religious groups who practiced a similar religion and therefore had some unity of civilizational practice. This is again a conjecture we don't know and as we know the Harappan civilization has not left us records which we can read there are seeds but since we don't have we have not deciphered the language so we really can't read them and even if we could we don't seem to find detailed accounts that we find in say Sumeria, Babylonia, Mesopotamian civilizations so written records don't seem to be there of the civilization of a kind that we can read and maybe they didn't have it and they have not been preserved, whatever way it is but cultural unity at least in terms of food is widely visible and it is visible from early mature Harappa to late Harappa when the urban centers are no longer functioning so that's an interesting result that we can see. Then we also see that the methods of cooking the kinds of meats that were cooked were also similar there seems to be some commonality between them it's not that they're uniform but across the region if you see a particular urban center and the rural areas nearby they seem to share the ways of cooking and preparing food so that is I think an interesting issue that between the urban centers and the rural areas surrounding it then there's a very large rural area, urban centers really very few if we look at the size of the area then the commonality of practice would show cultural civilalities and the urban and rural civilizations were not that significantly different at least when it came to food but of course as you said there were meat eaters and they ate a variety of meat and there are some issues which are interesting because we don't know what the answers are that while the kind of bones we see around would indicate they had domesticated cattle and they were using cattle in different ways and it also seems to show that if we look at the bones and other evidence we have that it did show that they seem to have used cattle for dairy as well but when we come to the lipid residue which is where the key evidence here is from the ceramics and that's the key evidence here it seems that we see much more prevalence of meat and not so much of the dairy products now that's a question why is it so is it because they have not been preserved the dairy vessels did not get preserved they used something which just didn't have the longevity we don't know but so that's a question mark the nursing researchers have raised why it is so and that while the bones of the animals during the days show that cattle was used widely and as we know the Indus Valley civilization had domesticated cattle independently as well that this does not show up so much in the dairy records but the meat eating seems to have been of cattle as well as of pigs and other animals there is this wide number of animals they have eaten but the dairy seems to be relatively less visible in the lipid residue so that's a question mark that is left here at the end of it but it does show that A you can see civilizational practices which is something more than 4000 years back the period covered is roughly about 1200-1500 years roughly the period they cover which is as I said early, mature as well as the late Harappan but in this you have the decay of the urban civilization so they really cover both sides of that you see the continuity of it but you also have this anomalies and that's always interesting because if you do break a historical problem of what what did the Pratt people do and so on you also get new problems so that's how knowledge really develops it's not closed but because you have found an answer therefore no new questions arise so these new questions still now remain but I think the interesting part is that we have now another instrument with which to analyze how the people there lived and that's always interesting to see a new tool coming to the existence to analyze history and this is something which is what modern science is bringing to the historical table so to say that you now have new instruments which you can use for finding a variety of things one of which is incidentally the lipid residue an analysis of the lipid residue and ceramic wear yes so can you tell us more about this tool like you're talking about the mentioned lipid residues and the study itself is titled Lipid Residues in Ceramic Portrait and Value Civilization so what essentially are these residues and why and how were the studied this is a project between Cambridge and Bananas Hindi University and they have been working for quite some time it also has MDU as a part of the project so they have been working for almost now last 10 years and while lipid residue is on ceramic wear it's something they have worked on for this project they also had earlier papers on ceramic wear discoveries itself what can they reduce from that but also importantly combining maps where they took the Surveyor General of India's maps for British times they took satellite imagery and using all of this they were able to locate very accurately where the Harappan settlements were and where they on panheolithic channels river channels sometimes they were what would we call Nallas which come up during rainy season and or when they were dispersed centres which are not really on the panheolithic channels and they came to conclusions that in different periods the different settlements have come up in different ways but they were able to map a large number of them ending with the mature Harappan where you can see the settlements on paleo channels those were interesting because you could superimpose satellite imagery data which actually shows you the paleo channels the old ancient river channels and you can see them from the topography as well as also plotting them accurately with your basic GPS data and so on so you can correlate all of this on the ground with the settlement data that you can go and search for the remains which you know are there and locate them accurately and therefore you have the geospatial coordinates which can match with the satellite data so this is interesting because it brings very different kinds of skins together normally people wouldn't think that in the archaeology paper you would find github references of the software use that's also here so this is what interests me that history actually was considered something and of course the historians would say history really means where text is here but I'm looking at history as history and archaeology combined and when you look at history in this way then the tools of discovery today are not limited to the text or the artifacts that you find but there are also many more things you can bring to the table and of course the analysis of the lipids residue on the ceramicware is only one part of it all these other tools is what makes I think archaeology and history today far more interesting because you can bring your knowledge of very different things together and to get to do what is the question in history what did we as human beings do in this period and not what some kings and queens might have done but what were the broad issues what are the broad currents how did they develop how did they live what were the technologies used and currently science and technology the instruments of science and technology are really providing additional information of a kind that would not have been possible say a few hundred years back or 50 years, 30 years back so I think that is the really the power of bringing different disciplines together and this has shown a question an answer to a question which would have been very difficult to reply earlier that where what did our ancestors or people who were in the Indus Valley civilization I wouldn't call ancestors because who knows we might have come from other parts of the world later our ancestors so we're not going to talk about that but what did the people in this place how did they live a question that we can answer in more detail today then we'd have been possible say 10, 20 years back and I think that's a very exciting way to do things to know that the historian has access to tools that earlier would not have been thought of and we can answer questions of a kind do we see a significant disruption of the civilization post the Harappa urbanization ending the answer is no we see a continuity which means that it wasn't that people came from outside and disrupted the civilization completely which is what we would expect if we saw a change in the way people lived and the cultural practices changed that didn't seem to happen here so we also are able to answer the question that the urban decline of the Harappa civilization that did not mean that the surrounding rural areas that civilization completely got disrupted that didn't happen we also therefore think this is probably much more agro-climatic that the surplus which was being extracted to sustain the cities and there are about five or six cities in that period which were really large that that was difficult to sustain the surplus dropped because of the change of rainfall which is what the supposition is which is the saying that which is the start of the Meghalaya era started with a mega drought and that's the reason that the surplus would have become smaller and that led to urban decays in many parts of the world including in the English valley so I think this gives us different kinds of answers that if you look only at the textual or only at the archaeological remains that we see in the places and that I think is what is exciting about this as well something which is rather mundane a lipid profile and when you talk of lipid profile we really thought think of our blood triglycerides and cholesterol so this is really that from ceramic where we get the lipid profile and the lipid analysis lipid residue analysis we are talking about civilizations from that that's a very interesting and an exciting journey at least for the maybe for the historians but also for people like us who have an interest in this kind of issues for other reasons and finally Praveen can you tell us what the results of the study mean for the notions of vegetarians and that really exist around the inhabitants of the Indus valley civilization well that they were not vegetarians is very obvious but this is also an interesting issue because if you remember sometime back in the National History Museum what is the National Museum sorry if you remember sometime back in the National Museum there was a Harappan culinary event and they had given a menu which had contained a large number of dishes which were from what they could reconstruct dishes with Harappan people ate and some of them were of course non-vegetarian dishes meat, fish and so on and the National Museum intervened and said hey we have a policy of nowhere non-vegetarian food on the National Museum premises this was held at the Nonsam National Museum and therefore all those non-vegetarian items were dropped now you have either to do two things either you are thinking you are doing an event which you want to recreate the culinary of the Harappan civilization or you have to say well you know National Museum policy of not serving non-vegetarian food to people in events that should take precedence is not even a rule by the way it's supposed to be a practice now why such a practice should overrun history is of course a question I would leave to the viewers but this is how our policy seems to be shaped because underlying all of this is what I call a very vegetarian upper-caste North Indian view of Hinduism in which the upper-caste Hindus believe that vegetarianism vegetarianism is a high state of humankind this is all other bhojans all other food is tamasik and rajasik maybe if you are king you can have that but it's certainly not the one which elevates humanity and that requires the bhojan which is vegetarian now this kind of belief is what drives a lot of this kind of historical reconstruction including the diet and it's also interesting that the Aryan civilization has in the center of a debate and what is the debate but this is not something which is distinct from what we see as a continuity which is the Aryan civilization and then as you know the Aryan civilization is what a large number of the Hindutva voters try to present to the people not Hinduism we studied it have said various things and historians have no bones about it that Hindus of course ate beef ate also pork and all of that so the question of vegetarianism is not there in history but it is there in the ideology of Hinduism by which you say Hindus did not eat beef or should not eat beef and all of this what I say this reconstruction of history therefore becomes dangerous for them and also the fact that you could say that as we have discussed earlier that it also shows that it is a distinct change that you see post Harappan civilization and you see the coming of the horse you see coming of a dramatic population which seem to have come using the horse and conquered large parts of North India starting with the Northwest so all of this is an anathema because it is not for them the history they want the history they want is rooted on the Hindu civilization become being entirely Sanskritic no other center of civilization existed in India except what the Mahabharata and Ramayana texts seem to show again the substrate over there we will forget for the time being and therefore reconstructing all of that means that this kind of history should not be allowed to enter the history books and this kind of history should not exhibit itself even in a culinary festival of the Harappan food habits in the national news so I think this is a part of the same battle and when we talk about what the Reich and others papers not Simon papers what they show that this seems to show that that approach of looking at actual history is much more interesting than trying to impose a schema on history and that sterile doesn't produce new knowledge controversy what we can find on the ground but this as I said is not a historical issue for them it is a political question and the political question is connected to cow slaughter banning of cow slaughter attacking Muslims and others who might actually consume beef so all of this is linked to current politics has nothing to do with the study of history as the current research also shows thank you for joining us today and that's all the time we have keep watching news click