Mehrgarh

Mehrgarh is an archaeological site on the Kachhi plain of Balochistan, in Pakistan, at the foot of the Bolan Pass where the mountains of the Iranian plateau meet the plains of the Indus. Here, from about 7000 BCE, people built villages of mud-brick houses and began to farm, growing barley and wheat and keeping cattle, sheep and goats. It is one of the earliest known farming settlements in South Asia, and it was lived in, on and off, for more than four thousand years.

The site was discovered in 1974 by a French archaeological mission led by Jean-François Jarrige and Catherine Jarrige, working with Pakistan's Department of Archaeology. Over decades of excavation they traced the slow growth of the settlement from small houses and storerooms to workshops producing fine painted pottery, figurines, copper objects and beads of shell, turquoise and lapis lazuli, materials that had travelled from the Gulf, the Iranian plateau and Afghanistan.

Among the most striking finds were molar teeth from early burials with tiny drilled holes, which researchers reported in 2006 as evidence of a form of dentistry practised more than seven thousand years ago. Mehrgarh is seen as a forerunner of the Indus civilisation that later flourished to the east. It was placed on UNESCO's tentative list in 2004. Today its low mounds, cut by the bed of the Bolan river, are open fields to the eye, but they hold one of the longest records of early village life anywhere.