Competencia social y habilidades de interacción social

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ot often has it been given to archaeologists,as it was given to Schliemann,” wrote John Marshall in the Illustrated London News of September 20, 1924, “to light upon the remains of a long-forgotten civilization. It looks, however, at this moment, as if we were on the threshold of such a discovery in the plains of the Indus.”

Marshall’s dramatic announcement was actually something of an understatement.

Thanks to Homer, the history—or at least the story—of Troy was well known long before Heinrich Schliemann dug for its remains. Before Marshall’s discovery, no one even had an inkling that India might once have been the center of a civilization as old and as large and sophisticated as those of Sumer and Egypt. There was no Iliad or Odyssey, no Bible or Gilgamesh, to tell about the Harappan people. The only evidence of their civilization was buried under Marshall’s mounds.

“Now, however,” continued Marshall, “there has unexpectedly been unearthed, in the south of the Panjab and in Sind, an entirely new class of objects which have nothing in common with those previously known to us.”

The Harappans were literate, though no literature has survived and no one has yet been able to decipher the short inscriptions found mostly on their seals. They were also technologically advanced, with bathrooms and toilets in many houses, and citywide drainage systems. They were sailors and traders, whose crafts have since been found throughout Mesopotamia. And they were urban: Marshall would uncover the cities of Harappa, which gave the civilization its name, and Mohenjo Daro, whose baked-brick buildings surrounded a high mound that was sort of an Indian acropolis. Later archaeol-ogists would uncover other large cities.

The more Marshall dug, the more excited he became. “To the archaeologist the site of Mohenjo-daro is one of the most fascinating that can well be imagined,” he wrote in February 1926. “The existence of roomy and well-built houses, and the relatively high degree of luxury denoted by their elaborate system of drainage, as well as by the charac-ter of many of the smaller antiquities found within, seem to betoken a social condition of the people far in advance of what was then prevailing in Mesopotamia and Egypt.”

The Indus were also a remarkably—maybe unprecedentedly—peaceful people.

Archaeologists found hardly any spears or arrows. Wrote historian Jane McIntosh: “It was an exceptionally well integrated state . . . where warfare was absent and everyone led

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a comfortable existence under the benevolent leadership of a dedicated priesthood.”

McIntosh saw the pacifism of the Indus people as a precursor to Gandhi’s.

Yet unlike the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations, which lasted for millennia, the Harappans’ endured only about six hundred years. By 1900BC, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were abandoned. People continued to live in the surrounding areas, but there were no longer signs of luxury items or writing or urban life. The reasons for the civiliza-tion’s demise, archaeologists hoped, might also be uncovered somewhere in the Indus Valley.

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At Mohenjo Daro and Harappa (pictured here), archaeologists found evidence of a hitherto unknown Bronze Age civilization. (Roger Wood/Corbis)

Mortimer Wheeler, who excavated at both Mohenjo Daro and Harappa during the 1940s, believed the Harappan cities were destroyed by invaders from the north. At Mohenjo Daro, Wheeler found the skeletons of men, women, and children sprawled on the ground, some bearing the marks of axes or swords. These, Wheeler concluded, were the peace-loving victims of a more violent people.

“They had been left there by raiders who had no further use for the city which they had stormed,” Wheeler wrote. “In that moment Mohenjo-daro was dead.”

Who were these invaders? Though there was no Indus text to tell of them, later Indian literature provided clues. Religious works known as the Vedas described the battles of people who called themselves Aryans. In the greatest of these, the Rig Veda, the Aryan war god Indra destroys ninety forts and “rends forts as age consumes a garment.” Among those conquered by the Aryans were the Dasas, a dark-skinned race that lived in fortified cities.

“It has in the past been supposed that [these forts] were mythical,” Wheeler wrote.

“The recent excavation of Harappa may be thought to have changed the picture. Here we have a highly evolved civilization of essentially non-Aryan type . . . now known to have employed massive fortifications, and known also to have dominated the river system of northwestern India at a time not distant from the likely period of the earlier Aryan inva-sions of that region. . . . Its ultimate extinction is . . . likely to have been completed by deliberate and large-scale destruction. It may be no mere chance that at a Late Period of Mohenjo-daro men, women, and children appear to have been massacred there.”

“On circumstantial evidence,” Wheeler concluded, “Indra stands accused.”

The evidence was, however, very circumstantial. Other archaeologists, such as George Dales, noted that some of the apparent wounds on the Mohenjo Daro skeletons appeared to have been made weeks or months before the victims’ deaths. Moreover, the skeletons were not found together in the citadel, where you’d expect a last stand, but scattered about the city, and the positions in which they were found could just as easily have indi-cated a hasty burial as a massacre. It wasn’t even clear that they’d all died in the same time period.

“Nothing delights the archaeologist more than excavating the ruins of some ancient disaster—be it flood, earthquake, invasion, or massacre,” wrote Dales in 1964. “The

‘massacre’ idea immediately ignited and has been used as a torch up to the present day by some historians, linguists, and archaeologists as visible, awful proof of the invasion of the subcontinent by Aryans. But what is the material evidence to substantiate the supposed invasion and massacre? Where are the burned fortresses, the arrowheads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defend-ers? Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion.”

The Rig Veda evidence was also dubious. Nothing in the text could be tied to any par-ticular location, and its descriptions of the forts don’t resemble Harappa or Mohenjo

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Daro. Many archaeologists believed that the purpose of the elevated areas of the cities was not defensive, as Wheeler assumed, but public or religious. At Mohenjo Daro, there was a Great Bath and a warehouse, neither of which had any military use. Nor were the walls of the city necessarily for defense; many believed they were used to buttress the ele-vated buildings. The forts described in the Rig Veda, if they existed at all, were as likely to have been in Iran or Central Asia as the Indus Valley.

Then there was the problem of dates. Most scholars think the Rig Veda was first writ-ten down sometime between 1500BCand 1000BC, hundreds of years after Harappa and Mohenjo Daro were abandoned. True, the Rig Veda first existed as an oral tradition, and it could have recalled events of a more distant past, but it was still a long stretch to tie its battles to the fall of the Indus cities. Indeed, many historians have come to see racist undertones in the effort to portray white Aryans as conquerors of darker-skinned Dasas.

Well before Hitler defined non-Jews as Aryans, the term had come to imply a superior white race (though the Vedas mention skin color only a few times, and never judgmen-tally). Even as the Indus were portrayed as an advanced civilization, wrote anthropologist Kenneth Kennedy, “the myth of invasions destroying Harappan cities created a paradigm in which the Aryans could still be considered the fountainhead of Indian civilization.” It also provided, Kennedy added, a precedent for the British colonizers who inherited the white man’s burden.

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If Aryan invaders didn’t destroy the Harappan cities, who—or what—was to blame?

Some archaeologists thought disruption of the Harappan trade with Mesopotamia was a factor. After about 2000BC, the number of Mesopotamian artifacts found in the Indus Valley declined, indicating a decline in trade. But none of these artifacts seemed essential to the cities’ survival, so the decline in trade was more likely to be an effect than a cause of the problem.

Another theory was that the Harappans wore out their environment, perhaps defor-esting the region for the firewood that baked the bricks for their buildings. This, too, seemed unlikely: only a few hundred acres of forest would have been required to build Mohenjo Daro and Harappa.

McIntosh argued that changing crop patterns were to blame. At the same time that farmlands were declining in the Indus Valley, farmers replaced the traditional wheat and barley with rice and various millets. The new crops flourished to the south and east, and farmers gradually moved in those directions. The Harappans may also have been victims of their own extensive sanitation systems, McIntosh speculated, if wastewater contami-nated the drinking water and spread disease.

Many scientists blamed environmental changes beyond the Harappans’ control. H. J.

Lambrick suggested that the Indus River shifted course, perhaps because of tectonic changes in the Himalayas, and Robert Raikes thought the river’s waters became dammed upstream from Mohenjo Daro. Gurdip Singh cited the changing salinity of the region’s

lakes as evidence of declining rainfall. Others suggested the problem was too much water:

deposits in and around Mohenjo Daro indicated the city experienced a number of sub-stantial floods, though some archaeologists suspected the deposits might have been left by wind, not water.

Any of these factors would have caused stresses and strains, and some—such as a change in the course of the Indus River or a devastating flood—might very well have caused the Indus people to abandon even as important a city as Mohenjo Daro. But why didn’t they rebuild elsewhere? Why did they stop making painted pottery and stamp seals, why did they stop constructing drainage systems, why did they stop writing? Why did they give up on a civilization that had reached such heights?

For some, the answer lay not in the civilization’s environment but in its ideology.

Anthropologist Gregory Possehl noted that the Great Bath at Mohendo Daro was abandoned before the city itself. Since the bath—and water in general—clearly played an important role in the Indus religion and culture, the people must have somehow lost their faith. Wrote Possehl: “The fatal flaw was centrally, and most importantly, sociocul-tural in nature; not flood, avulsion, drought, trade, disease, locusts, invasion or any other of a myriad of ‘natural’ or ‘outside’ forces. A failed Indus ideology is . . . the sociocultural flaw.”

Possehl could only guess at why the ideology failed, but he suspected it might have been the very harmony that McIntosh and others admired. “If the world stood still, the well-integrated, tightly organized sociocultural systems like the Indus Civilization would work pretty well,” Possehl wrote. “But the world does not stand still and sociocultural systems of this highly integrated type, which does not require constant negotiation, are vulnerable to changing conditions, both external and internal. It might take six hundred years for the system to fail, but eventually the changing world catches up with them.”

Historian Matthew Fitzsimons agreed. “The Harappans mastered some of the basic necessities for city-living that almost no one so far has managed,” he wrote. “They had to have concentrated authority which in turn was sanctioned by religion. The upshot of this was a defective capacity to respond to change.”

These historians found in the Indus civilization not only the origins of India’s later peaceful ideologies but also less appealing traits. Its harmony stemmed in part from a highly stratified society in which everyone knew his or her place—as in a caste system.

But just as the Aryans can’t be cast as proto-Europeans, the Indus can’t be definitively tied to later Indians. Both Aryan and Indus cultures influenced what was to come, proba-bly in many ways, but we don’t know enough of either to do more than speculate.

Similarly, we can’t settle on a single explanation for the decline of the Indus civiliza-tion. Here, too, a combination of factors probably came into play. The process was grad-ual—Mohenjo Daro was in decline by 2200BC, but other cities lasted until around 1800

BC—further lending itself to multiple explanations.

“The process of decline and collapse, as it appears in the archaeological record at key sites, unfolds in various ways,” wrote archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri. “It is not one event

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but different kinds of events which are in need of elucidation here, and this may explain why various types of hypotheses have been offered as well as why one may consider more than one explanation to be plausible.”

To Investigate Further

Lahiri, Nayanjot, ed. The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000.

A collection of diverse views, often illuminatingly juxtaposed, from archaeologists, scien-tists, and historians from the 1920s through the 1990s.

McIntosh, Jane. A Peaceful Realm. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2002.

An accessible, illustrated history.

Possehl, Gregory. The Indus Civilization. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002.

A thorough overview of Indus technology, architecture, art, writing, and religion.

In document CAPÍTULO I DESARROLLO SOCIAL EN LA INFANCIA (página 65-71)