Jhukar phase

"Jarrige (1973) complains of the tendency of lumping everything not typically Harappan under the rubric of the Jhukar culture, "a problem which is further complicated when, by attempting to harmonize the archaeological data with philological arguments, people have developed the habit of attributing to the Jhukar culture all discoveries amenable of offering some correlation with the Iranian world and Central Asia" (263). Jarrige goes on to consider whether there was a disruption of sedentary urban life in the Indus Valley and a sudden drop in agricultural productivity of that area accompanied by a shift to seminomadic pastoralism with evidence of warfare—in short, all of the features that would ideally accompany an intrusion of Indo-Aryan nomads. As the excavator of Pirak, the only well-preserved second millennium B.C.E. site from the area (which he dates from 1700 to 700 B.C.E.), Jarrige (1985) finds a "town" of some size with "elaborate architecture" and evidence of a more intense level of irrigation and cultivation than occurred in the third millennium B.C.E.: "Just the opposite of that which has been presumed on the basis of negative evidence" (46)."

"It is thus absolutely clear that: (i) there was an occupational and cultural continuity from the Mature Harappan times to those when the Jhukar-style pottery came into being; and (ii) there is hardly any justifiable case for treating the so-called Jhukar Culture’ as an entity quite separate from and having nothing to do with the Mature Harappan."