Ans.
The ruins of Harappa were first described in 1842 by
Charles Masson in his Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan,
Afghanistan, and the Punjab, where locals talked of an ancient city extending
"thirteen cosses" (about 25 miles), but no archaeological interest
would attach to this for nearly a century.
In 1856, General Alexander Cunningham, later director
general of the archaeological survey of northern India, visited Harappa where
the British engineers John and William Brunton were laying the East Indian
Railway Company line connecting the cities of Karachi and Lahore. John wrote:
"I was much exercised in my mind how we were to get ballast for the line
of the railway". They were told of an ancient ruined city near the lines,
called Brahminabad. Visiting the city, he found it full of hard well-burnt
bricks, and, "convinced that there was a grand quarry for the ballast I
wanted", the city of Brahminabad was reduced to ballast. A few months
later, further north, John's brother William Brunton's "section of the
line ran near another ruined city, bricks from which had already been used by
villagers in the nearby village of Harappa at the same site. These bricks now
provided ballast along 93 miles (150 km) of the railroad track running from
Karachi to Lahore".
In 1872–75, Alexander Cunningham published the first
Harappan seal (with an erroneous identification as Brahmi letters). It was half
a century later, in 1912, that more Harappan seals were discovered by J. Fleet,
prompting an excavation campaign under Sir John Hubert Marshall in 1921–22 and
resulting in the discovery of the civilisation at Harappa by Marshall, Rai
Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni and Madho Sarup Vats, and at Mohenjo-daro by Rakhal Das
Banerjee, E. J. H. MacKay, and Marshall. By 1931, much of Mohenjo-Daro had been
excavated, but excavations continued, such as that led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler,
director of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1944. Among other
archaeologists who worked on IVC sites before the independence in 1947 were
Ahmad Hasan Dani, Brij Basi Lal, Nani Gopal Majumdar, and Sir Marc Aurel Stein.
Following independence, the bulk of the archaeological
finds were inherited by Pakistan where most of the IVC was based, and
excavations from this time include those led by Wheeler in 1949, archaeological
adviser to the Government of Pakistan. Outposts of the Indus Valley
civilisation were excavated as far west as Sutkagan Dor in Pakistani
Balochistan, as far north as at Shortugai on the Amu Darya (the river's ancient
name was Oxus) in current Afghanistan, as far east as at Alamgirpur, Uttar
Pradesh, India and as far south as at Malwan, in modern-day Surat, Gujarat, India.
In 2010, heavy floods hit Haryana in India and damaged
the archaeological site of Jognakhera, where ancient copper smelting furnaces
were found dating back almost 5,000 years. The Indus Valley Civilisation site
was hit by almost 10 feet of water as the Sutlej Yamuna link canal overflowed.