Indo-Iranian Archaeology

Indo-Iranian archaeology excavates the material culture of the Indus Valley civilization and the wider Iranian plateau, and examines its uncertain relationship to the Vedic and Avestan textual traditions that later Indo-Iranian peoples produced. The discipline effectively began in 1922, when excavation at Mohenjo daro in present day Pakistan, following an earlier find at Harappa, revealed a large, sophisticated Bronze Age urban civilization whose script remains undeciphered and whose religious life is known only from artifacts, seals depicting figures in yogic like postures and animal motifs, rather than from any text the civilization itself left behind.

Because the Indus script cannot yet be read, the relationship between this archaeologically documented civilization and the Vedic religion later composed in the same subcontinent is a genuinely open historical question, not a settled continuity the way later Vedic and Hindu tradition sometimes presents it. The atlas relies on Indo-Iranian archaeology to keep that uncertainty visible, describing Indus Valley material culture on its own excavated terms rather than reading later Vedic religious concepts back onto artifacts whose original meaning is not independently attested.