It is currently possible to discern cultural continuities linking specific prehistoric social entities in South Asia into one cultural tradition. Thi… - Jim G. Shaffer

Since stamp seals were not available to everyone in a social group, and because their inscriptions most likely reflect titles and/or personal names, it is reasonable to conclude that cattle were invested with social importance and cultural identity. Moreover, if seals were also a marriage talisman, as Fairservis argues, they suggest that cattle constituted a wealth category associated with forging important social relationships such as marriage. Furthermore, if cattle, as wealth, provided access to reproductive sources, they were probably also avenues to establishing, maintaining or breaking other important social, economic, political and religious relationships.

Moreover, available chronologies indicate that Mehrgarh was contemporary with comparable Southwest Asian phenomena which, combined with the abs­ence o f contemporary food producing groups on the Iranian Plateau, argues against a diffusionist explanation. The Mehrgarh data raise serious questions about diffusion as an all-encompassing explanation for major South Asian cultu­ral developments. The sophistication of this aceramic neolithic food-producing complex, and its early date, suggest the possibility that subsequent bronze and early iron age cultural developments were likewise indigenous.

The gradual reduction in size, a phenomenon associated with domesti­cation, and the occurrence o f wild progenitors in earlier levels, indicate that the domestication o f these animals was also a local process.... Although similar species were domesticated elsewhere, the pattern in which hum an actors arranged them in South Asia was distinctive to the region.