Letter from Baluchistan: The Guns of Mehrgarh	Volume 56 Number 2, March/April 2003
by Massound Ansari

Tribal feuds imperil the future of one of South Asia's most ancient sites.

Although often overshadowed by the grander, and much later, Indus Valley sites of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, Mehrgarh is well known in archaeological circles as the only South Asian site with a 5,000-year-long continuous sequence of settlements, beginning in the eighth millennium B.C. It also happens to be the site of a violent battle between warring tribes, a conflict that drove away a French couple who had spent almost three decades excavating the site. ARCHAEOLOGY's Islamabad-based correspondent Massoud Ansari travels to Mehrgarh, in Pakistan's remote Baluchistan province, to take a look at the troubled past and grim future of one of South Asia's most important archaeological sites.

Massound Ansari is an Islamabad-based correspondent for ARCHAEOLOGY.

© 2003 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/0303/abstracts/letter.html