an ancient Indus City Walk

An Ancient Indus City Walk:
A Website Review

March 3, 2007

One major genre of website I would call the storehouse site. These sites dominate a particular band of information and tend to be group projects.. as opposed to an individual site. The site Harappa.com is certainly a storehouse site. One look at its credits page gives an idea of how many people are involved: more than a dozen individuals plus numerous institutional connections. There are lots of information packets available on the site.. but it lacks an overall stamp of personality.. which is something I miss.

There are surprising bits of information on the site. You can listen to an audio recording of Gandhi or view 19th century lithographs of India. Then again, you can go deep and view the archeological finds from the ancient Indus civilization that flourished from 2600-1900 BC. My own interest is in this ancient material, and that is what I concentrated my browsing upon.

The information gleaned through archeological work is crucial for understanding the past, but I am generally disappointed with the uncreative presentation of this material.. the articles come out all layers and graphs. I want not just facts, but a presentation that makes this culture present in my imagination. I realize that this goal can only be realized after many layers and potsherds have been analyzed.. but the same could be said about translating a book. A translation project is only finished when it can be presented in a form accessible to readers.. even though there has been much unseen linguistic and cultural excavation going on in the process of finishing the translation.

Harappa.com offers "Ancient Indus City Walks" (the Indus is the river alongside which this early civilization took root). One of these walks consists of a guided tour around the archeological site of Harappa itself. The tour is excellent in terms of showing us the archeological site.. and the first slide entitled "background" describes the history of archeological work at this site. This leads to my major complaint about the site: it is great at documenting archeological work, but not so great at trying to instill life into this site.

Now to be fair, there are lots of questions about this site and the script has not even been deciphered yet. So I recognize that there is plenty that we do not know about Harappa. But with the use of maps that give an overview of the site and more use of modern artistic renderings of Harappa this "walk" would better reach the ideal sketched above.

In the final slides there are some attempts to connect modern practices and structures with what is seen in the archeological remains from several thousand years back. Then in four audio tracks there is a similar attempt to give the modern context of the ruins.. the sounds that envelope this place. This was the most interesting part of the virtual "walk" around Harappa. In the final audio track we even get a man telling a short moralizing tale about the destruction of the city. I would have liked to see some of this same zeal in the earlier slides.