Bhagwanpura Archaeological Site

Bhagwanpura, or Baghpur, is a village 24 km north-east of Kurukshetra in Haryana, with an archaeological site on the bank of the Hakra Ghaggar channel. Its interest lies in the meeting of two cultures here, the late Harappan and the Painted Grey Ware, the latter generally associated with the Vedic people.

The site shows one period of habitation in two phases. Late Harappan people, from about 1700 to 1300 BCE, lived in burnt-brick houses and raised mud platforms against floods. Then, from about 1400 to 1000 BCE, the new pottery appeared alongside the old, and its makers moved from wattle-and-daub huts to mud-walled houses, one of them with thirteen rooms and a courtyard. Some scholars think the burnt bricks of this phase went into Vedic fire altars. Finds from Bhagwanpura, among them a carnelian pendant shaped like a humped bull, are held at the ASI museum in the Sheikh Chilli's Tomb complex in Kurukshetra.