Archaeologists and geographers have long debated the possible link between environmental change and the rise and fall of the earliest civilizations in South Asia. This collaborative project is the first stage of a broader programme that will integrate geographical and archaeological field research and analysis to reconstruct the transforming cultural and environmental landscape of northwest India in the critical period between 2000 and 300 BC. This was when the courses of a number of major rivers are believed to have shifted.

This project marks the first integrated investigation of the environmental and cultural processes that accompanied these shifts and their impact on cultural development, and brings together the best of Indian and British expertise in the relevant human and environmental sciences. Understanding how and why past Indian societies responded to environmental threats and changes has critical resonance with current questions of human response to climatic and environmental change.