[1][b] The discovery of Harappa and, soon afterwards, Mohenjo-Daro, two major urban settlements of IVC, was the culmination of work that had begun after the founding of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861.

[3][4] The ancient city of Harappa was heavily damaged under British rule when bricks from the ruins were used as track ballast to construct the Lahore–Multan Railway.

Although modern Harappa has a legacy railway station from the Raj period, it is a small crossroads town of 15,000 people today.

[4] In 2005, a controversial amusement park scheme at the site was abandoned when builders unearthed many archaeological artefacts during the early stages of building work.

[13] The Indus Valley civilization was basically an urban culture sustained by surplus agricultural production and commerce, the latter including trade with Elam and Sumer in southern Mesopotamia.

Both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are generally characterised as having "differentiated living quarters, flat-roofed brick houses, and fortified administrative or religious centers.

"Cotton was woven and dyed for clothing; wheat, rice, and a variety of vegetables and fruits were cultivated; and a number of animals, including the humped bull, was domesticated,"[14] as well as "fowl for fighting".

A centralised administration for each city, though not the whole civilisation, has been inferred from the revealed cultural uniformity; however, it remains uncertain whether authority lay with a commercial oligarchy.

[16] What is clear is that Harappan society was not entirely peaceful, with the human skeletal remains demonstrating some of the highest rates of injury (15.5%) found in South Asian prehistory.

The bioarchaeologists who examined the remains have suggested that the combined evidence for differences in mortuary treatment and epidemiology indicate that some individuals and communities at Harappa were excluded from access to basic resources like health and safety.

[23] By far the most exquisite and obscure artefacts unearthed to date are the small, square steatite (soapstone) seals engraved with human or animal motifs.

In February 2006, a school teacher in the village of Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu, discovered a stone celt (tool) with an inscription estimated to be up to 3,500 years old.

[24][25] Indian epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan postulated that the four signs were in the Indus script and called the find "the greatest archaeological discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu".