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New Evidence for Early Silk in the Indus Civilization

Irene L. Good¹, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer² & Richard H. Meadow¹

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1. Harvard University, Peabody Museum
2. University of Wisconsin at Madison, Anthropology

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Document Type:

Manuscript

Date:

Received 20 May 2008 11:19 UTC; Posted 23 May 2008

Subjects:

Ecology, Earth & Environment

Tags:

• South Asia
• Indus Civilization
• Archaeology
• Silk
• Harappa

Abstract:

Silk is an important economic fiber, and is generally considered to have been the exclusive cultural heritage of China. Silk weaving is evident from the Shang period, though the earliest evidence for silk textiles in ancient China dates to more than a millennium earlier. New study of fibers from Harappan bronze artifacts reveals surprising early evidence for knowledge of silkworking in South Asia, the earliest evidence in the world for any silk outside China, and roughly contemporaneous with the earliest Chinese evidence for silk. This important new finding brings into question the traditional historical notion of sericulture as being an exclusively Chinese invention.

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License:

This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Good, Irene, Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, and Meadow, Richard. New Evidence for Early Silk in the Indus Civilization. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.1900.1> (2008)

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