Does the Indus Valley Civilization Satisfy the Standard Civilization Criteria?
When tested against standard criteria — centralized authority, royal hierarchy, military infrastructure, palatial architecture, administrative writing — the Indus archaeological record does not satisfy them. Not partially or ambiguously, but consistently and across all sites. A case for reframing the IVC as a Bronze Age trade network.
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Part of the DSSM corpus — 97 open-access papers spanning cognitive archaeology, symbolic systems theory, and civilizational analysis.
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