India, The First Civilization

I have previously published a number of videos about the Indus Valley Civilisation about which we are still learning so much.

It is quite remarkable that even around 100 years after the discovery of this ancient civilisation so little has been excavated, less than 10% of over 1,000 sites associated with the civilisation.

The present film from the Secrets in the Dust series follows a double trajectory of looking at the original discovery, and present work on the sites.

It has reconstructions of Sir John Marshall’s work as Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India in the 1920s, and follows the work of Michael Jansen in the early 2000s.

Marshall was succeeded in the post sometime later by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who had a very different and more modern style of archaeology.

Along the way the film tries to reconstruct the unique features of the civilisation and the ongoing work on the sites, with some CGI graphic reconstructions to support the descriptions.