The Prehistory of Sindh and Las Bela (Balochistan): Thirty years of surveys and excavations (1985-2014)

During the last thirty years, our knowledge of the archaeology of Sindh and Las Bela in Balochistan (Pakistan) has greatly improved mainly thanks to the results of the research and excavations carried out by the Italian Archaeological Mission. Until the 1980s the prehistory of the two regions was centred upon the impressive urban remains of the Bronze Age Indus Civilization, and the Palaeolithic assemblages discovered at the top of the limestone terraces of the Rohri Hills in Upper Sindh and Ongar in Lower Sindh, while almost nothing was known of the Arabian Sea coastal zone despite the important work carried out in the region by Professor A.R. Khan of Karachi University in the late 1970s. Our knowledge has drastically improved thanks to the discoveries of a great number of sites in different territories of the two provinces, and the development of a radiocarbon sequence based on more than one hundred dates that help interpret the timing of the events that took place in the region from the middle Holocene period onwards