The first farmers: Neolithic and copper-age villages

AI-drafted · awaiting admin review

From about 7000 BCE people began to grow crops, keep animals and live in villages, first in the north-west and later across India.

c. 7000 BCE – c. 1000 BCE (overlapping with the Harappan age)

How it was ruled

Village communities, probably led by elders or chiefs. Large walled settlements and craft workshops show growing organisation.

People lived in mud-brick or wattle-and-daub houses, sometimes in pits for warmth in cold places. They buried their dead with pots and ornaments.

Farming wheat, barley, rice and millets; herding cattle, sheep and goats; making polished stone axes, pottery and, later, copper tools.

Grains, pulses, milk, meat from domestic animals, fish and wild plants.

Beads of semi-precious stone, shells and copper moved between regions; marine shells reached far inland.

Balochistan (today's Pakistan): Mehrgarh, from about 7000 BCE, is one of the earliest farming villages in South Asia.
Jammu and Kashmir: Burzahom near Srinagar had pit houses, bone tools and burials with dogs (c. 3000–1500 BCE).
Bihar: Chirand on the Ganga shows early farming with bone tools and pottery.
Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka: Ash mounds such as Utnur and Sanganakallu mark the cattle pens of early herders in the Deccan.
Maharashtra: Copper-age (Chalcolithic) villages at Inamgaon and Daimabad grew crops with the help of small channels.
Rajasthan: Ahar and Gilund near Udaipur used copper from local mines.

c. 7000 BCE: Farming begins at Mehrgarh
c. 3000 BCE: Neolithic settlement at Burzahom in Kashmir
c. 2000–1000 BCE: Copper-using village cultures spread in central India and the Deccan

Crops domesticated or adopted in this period — rice, millets, pulses, cotton — still feed India.

Sources