Keeladi: Evidence, Chronology and Significance
A new evidence review finds strong support for a major early-historic settlement in the Vaigai valley, while separating radiocarbon dates from broader claims about literacy, cities and Indus-script continuity.
How Credible Is India’s 7.8% GDP Growth Estimate?
India’s April–June 2026 growth estimate needs context: a new GDP series, revised comparisons, price adjustments and the difference between national output and household prosperity.
Sri Lanka After the Crisis: Recovery Is Not the Same as Transformation
Stabilisation can restore basic macroeconomic functioning, but durable recovery requires productivity, exports, public-sector credibility and protection of household welfare.
The Indus Script: What We Know and What We Do Not
Hundreds of signs, thousands of inscriptions and no consensus decipherment: a careful guide to the evidence and the limits of inference.
Civilisations & archaeology
Material evidence first: settlements, inscriptions, artefacts, dates and competing interpretations across the Indus, South India and Sri Lanka.
Indus Script Research Laboratory
A public corpus, provenance and hypothesis-testing framework for studying the script without assuming a language in advance.
Can Code Decipher the Indus Script? A Review of the Kee2u Project
A public code repository offers a serious experiment in Tamil morphology and sign statistics. Its results are useful, but they do not yet identify the Harappan language or produce a decipherment.
Can Mathematics Read the Indus Script as Old Tamil?
Watch Adwait Kulkarni’s presentation of a computational approach to the Indus script, published by Yajna Devam, with links and full credits to the original creators.
What Was the Indus Valley Civilisation?
A concise evidence-led guide to one of the world’s earliest urban traditions — its cities, economy, writing, technology and unresolved questions.
The Indus Script: What We Know and What We Do Not
Hundreds of signs, thousands of inscriptions and no consensus decipherment: a careful guide to the evidence and the limits of inference.
Dholavira: Water, Urban Form and Harappan Ingenuity
Why the desert-edge city of Dholavira is central to understanding Harappan engineering and adaptation.
Rakhigarhi and Ancient DNA: What Genetics Can — and Cannot — Tell Us
Ancient DNA has transformed population history, but archaeological identity and genetic ancestry are not the same thing.
Lothal and the Maritime Networks of the Harappan World
A coastal settlement at the centre of debates about Harappan seafaring, trade and hydraulic engineering.
Adichanallur: Burials, Technology and an Archaeological Puzzle
The famous urn-burial site offers a deep record of social practice and technology, while reminding us how much early excavation history can complicate interpretation.
Economy, education & everyday development
India and Sri Lanka examined through data, institutions, productivity, human development and the quality of public statistics.
How Credible Is India’s 7.8% GDP Growth Estimate?
India’s April–June 2026 growth estimate needs context: a new GDP series, revised comparisons, price adjustments and the difference between national output and household prosperity.
The Indian Economy: Scale, Structure and the Productivity Question
India is simultaneously a major services economy, an industrialising state and a country with a very large labour force still outside high-productivity formal employment.
Why Tamil Nadu Became One of India’s Most Industrialised States
Automotive clusters, diversified manufacturing, urban networks and human capital created an unusually broad industrial base.
India’s Education System: Expansion, Quality and the Skills Gap
Access has expanded dramatically, but learning outcomes, institutional quality and employability remain uneven across regions and social groups.
India’s R&D Challenge: From Engineering Talent to Research Intensity
A large engineering workforce and successful technology sectors have not yet translated into research intensity comparable with leading innovation economies.
Sri Lanka After the Crisis: Recovery Is Not the Same as Transformation
Stabilisation can restore basic macroeconomic functioning, but durable recovery requires productivity, exports, public-sector credibility and protection of household welfare.
What happened? What is the evidence? What does it mean? How certain are we?
Every major claim is separated into established evidence, interpretation and uncertainty. Ancient identity is not projected backwards from modern politics, and economic numbers are reported with methodology and revisions.
Read our standards →Move from the headline to the site, date and source.
The archaeology explorer connects major sites across the region. The timeline and source-led knowledge model are designed to grow with each new investigation.
Open the archaeology explorer →Open the data desk →Analysis
Long-form work on evidence, nationalism, public archives and how better methods improve public understanding.
Archaeology, Nationalism and the Discipline of Uncertainty
Ancient evidence is politically powerful precisely because the people who created it cannot correct our modern stories about them.
Why South Asian Archaeology Needs Better Digital Public Archives
Excavation reports, photographs, plans, laboratory results and catalogues become far more valuable when they are searchable, linked and preserved.