The excavations at the site of Sanjan in Gujarat’s Valsad district in 2002, led by archaeologist Dr Kurush F Dalal, revealed a fascinating Early Medieval urban settlement from the 8th to the 14th century CE with its heyday from the 10th to the 12th centuries. An enormous volume of west Asian and Chinese ceramics revealed an entrepot involved in the trade of the Indian Ocean littoral from West Asia to China and back. Sanjan is also very important to the Parsi Zoroastrian community as this was the apocryphal place of their landing in India in the late 8th century CE. Apart from a quasi-historical poem from 1600 CE, there was no concrete proof of this. The Sanjan excavations, with the circumstantial evidences of chronology and West Asian trade coupled with the discovery of a Parsi Tower of Silence, confirmed this. At our Online Talk, #QissaESanjan, he talks about this equivalent of Mumbai in the 10th century and tells us how oral history was proven right by archaeology.

About the speaker

Dr Kurush F Dalal has a BA in Ancient Indian History and History from the University of Mumbai, an MA in Archaeology and a PhD on the early Iron Age in Rajasthan, both from Deccan College, Pune University. Subsequently he shifted focus to the Early Medieval Period predominantly on the West Coast of India and excavated the sites of Sanjan, Chandore and Mandad. These excavations and the data recovered have had a strong impact on scholarship in the region. The recent Mandad excavations have revealed a brand new hitherto unknown Indo-Roman Port site with antecedents going back even further. Dr Dalal also actively works on Memorial Stones and Ass-curse Stones in India and dabbles in Numismatics, Defense Archaeology, Architecture, Ethnoarchaeology and allied disciplines. He is the Co-Director of the Salsette Explorations Project, a massive Urban Archaeology Project documenting the Archaeology of Mumbai since 2015, thus extending his interest from the Medieval into the Colonial Period.