The Bronze Age Harappan Civilization was one of the world’s earliest great urban civilizations and flourished from ~4600 BP to 3900 BP. The collapse of its integrated urban structure has prompted much speculation, including suggestions of climate and environmental change playing a role in their demise. Palaeoclimate proxy evidence indicates that the time of the Harappan Civilization was marked by variable monsoon strength, punctuated by episodes of aridity. A decrease in the strength of the South Asian monsoon at 4.2 ka BP has been linked by some to the termination of the urban phase of the Harappan Civilization. However, the link between climate change and Indus cultural transformation is equivocal, particularly because of a lack of well-dated paleoclimate records from the region occupied by the Indus Civilization.

For my PhD, I am reconstructing the Holocene palaeoclimate history using lacustrine sediments from three lakes lying across the precipitation gradient on the plains of NW India. This study will contribute to our understanding of the Holocene history of past environmental and climatic change in this region and assess possible climate-cultural connections.

I am funded by Gates Cambridge Trust and my PhD research is supervised by Prof. David Hodell.


Last updated on 08-Sep-12 16:38