Burzahom: life before the modern dispute

A settlement before the written histories

Burzahom lies on a karewa terrace northeast of Srinagar. Its excavated remains preserve successive ways of living, from Neolithic settlement through later occupation. This history begins with homes, tools, food and burial practices, rather than the names of kings.

The broad date of about 3000–1000 BCE used in the timeline describes the principal prehistoric sequence, not the whole history of activity at the site. Archaeological phases cover long spans. They cannot be divided honestly into a calendar of individual monthly events.

Excavation and changing interpretations

Helmut de Terra and T. T. Paterson carried out trial investigations in 1935. T. N. Khazanchi directed the Archaeological Survey of India’s extensive excavations from 1960 to 1971. R. S. Fonia later assembled the excavation report using field records, stored finds and comparative research.

The report acknowledges disturbance at the site and changes to the interpretation of its sequence. It separates an early phase without pottery from later pottery-bearing Neolithic phases, followed by megalithic and historical occupation. Its radiocarbon table uses samples from several layers, with uncertainties and calibration, rather than a single founding date.

This research history matters: the year when an object was excavated, the age of the layer containing it and the date when a report was published are three different things.

Homes, tools and daily work

The remains include pits cut into the ground, postholes and later structures at or above ground level. The nomination prepared for UNESCO describes stone and bone tools, pottery and changes in settlement form. These traces allow questions about shelter and work that written royal histories rarely answer.

Abdul Rashid Lone’s archaeological overview notes that the interpretation of some pits as dwellings has been debated, with storage proposed as an alternative function. It also describes evidence of cultivation, animal husbandry, hunting and fishing. Farming did not necessarily replace every older means of obtaining food at once.

Black-burnished pottery, bone implements and human and animal burials form part of that wider material record. Their significance depends on the context in which they were found. An isolated object can be striking, but its relationship to a floor, pit or burial is what makes it useful for reconstructing activity.

Burials and new research

A 2025 study by Aparna Dwivedi and colleagues examined ancient DNA from skeletal material associated with Kashmir’s prehistoric and medieval past. From twelve sampled remains, the researchers obtained four usable mitochondrial genomes, representing one Neolithic, one megalithic and two medieval individuals.

The authors discuss affinities with populations represented in the Swat Valley and Central Asian datasets. These results concern a small number of maternal lineages. They do not describe the whole ancestry of Kashmir’s population, and the study itself calls for more evidence.

Burials are evidence of individual lives and social practices as well as material for scientific research. Genetic affinity does not establish a person’s language, political identity or the legitimacy of a modern state’s territorial claim.

A wider Kashmiri landscape

Burzahom should be studied alongside other settlements, including Gufkral and Kanispur. Together, they make it possible to compare changes in settlement and production across the Valley instead of treating one excavation as the history of everyone who lived there.

The site appears on the UNESCO Tentative List. That is a preliminary nomination status, not inscription as a World Heritage Site. Its importance for Kashmir’s past rests on the surviving evidence and the questions it opens about people’s lives, not on confusing those two designations.