Pirak, an isolated settlement on the Indus fringes, gives us a glimpse of life in the obscure period after the Indus civilization.
Some of its buildings are simple residential houses consisting of a main room with wall niches and a smaller kitchen. Blocks of similar rooms enclosed within an outer wall contained craftworking debris and were probably workshops as well as homes.
A great diversity of crafts were practised here, including metalworking (at first copper and bronze, but later also iron), bead and glass making, working shell and ivory, making seals and figurines.
Particularly interesting are the terracotta models of camels and horse-riders - the first evidence of the horse in the subcontinent.
Some houses had several larger rooms, with large silos for storing grain. These may have been the residences of the community's leaders. Rice was the main crop cultivated here: this would have required irrigation, and the scale of the irrigation works needed and the labour required for their maintenance implies the need for some degree of organized control.
Pirak was probably a permanent regional centre for herders and farmers living in small villages over a wide area, of which no trace remains. Material from the settlement included ivory from India, source also of the staple crop, rice, and many other objects paralleled in Central Asia. Other artefacts show continuity with the earlier cultural traditions of the region.
There is nothing to indicate the presence of Indo-Aryans, but the horse and camel figurines and some of the pottery and other objects here at least show contacts with alien groups.
Some penetration of such groups into South Asia was likely to have been through the Bolan Pass (in which Pirak is located) as it has always been one of the main access routes South Asia.
