Abstract

 Recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental data have made increasingly clearer that the Indus Valley Civilisation (South Asia, 3rd millennium BCE) occupied a vast geographical area characterised by different ecological niches. According to the most recent archaeobotanical research, millets seem to have been key crops at the roots of the Indus Valley Civilisation. This paper presents a novel combination of archaeological ethnographical and modelling data to help us reconstruct the historical depth of millet exploitation in the Indus Valley.

The modelling approach taken in this work combines Indigenous Local Knowledge (ILK) and Academic Ecological Knowledge (AEK) to understand potential distribution and strategies of millets cultivation in the past and specifically for the plains of the Indus River. This is then assessed against novel archaeobotanical data from newly excavated sites and legacy data. Such an approach provides a better understanding of the historical dynamics of millet crops in one of the first urban civilisation of the Old World.