Special Issue: India, Pakistan, and Ceylon
On the cover: Articles on archaeological research in India, Pakistan, and Ceylon.
Archaeology in Pakistan
By: F.A. Khan
Pakistan has been a cradle of civilizations through the ages. It possesses one of the oldest and most distinguished cultural heritages of the world. But archaeology has a very recent growth here. There is at present only one organization, the Department of Archaeology, which is actively engaged in field and laboratory investigations. Starting from a […]
The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjo-Daro
By: George F. Dales
Nothing delights the archaeologist more than excavating the ruins from some ancient disaster–be it a flood, earthquake, invasion, or massacre. This does not reflect an inordinately ghoulish tendency in the character of archaeologists. It is simply that a much more complete picture of the life and times of an ancient site is preserved if it […]
The Great Basses Wreck
By: Peter Throckmorton
When I arrived in Ceylon, a great deal of preliminary research had been done by Arthur Clarke and Mike Wilson on the problem of identifying the Great Basses shipwreck. With the help of Major R. Raven-Harte, an expert on the history of Ceylon, they had established that the Dutch East India Company had used Surat […]
Ceylon and the Underwater Archaeologist
By: Arthur C. Clarke
Ceylon, where I have lived since 1956, is almost a virgin territory for the underwater archaeologist. My partner, Mike Wilson, and I first became aware of this when skin-diving off the great harbor of Trincomalee, on the east coast of the island. We were exploring some two hundred yards from a precipitous headland known as […]
The Indus Civilization and Dilmun, the Sumerian Paradise Land
By: Samuel Noah Kramer
One of the most significant and impressive archaeological achievements of the twentieth century centers around the discovery of the ancient Indus civilization which probably flourished from about 2500 to 1500 B.C., and extended over a vast territory from the present Pakistan-Iran border to the foot of the Himalayas and to the Gulf of Cambay. Much […]
Archaeology in India
By: A. Ghosh
Official archaeology in India is now over a century old: in December 1961 the Archaeological Survey of India, a Government department and the chief antiquarian organization in the country, celebrated its centenary. One of the functions in the celebration was an International Conference on Asian Archaeology, the first of its kind, which was attended by […]