Professor Vasant Shinde is one of India’s leading field archaeologists. He is Vice-Chancellor of Pune’s Deccan College and has headed a number of excavations around the country, from Harappan sites in Gujarat and Haryana to Chalcolithic—Copper stone age, 3000-2000 BCE—sites in Madhya Pradesh and the Deccan, to protohistoric and early historic sites in Rajasthan and Maharashtra. He believes his current research, based on new DNA evidence from the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi, Haryana