B. B. Lal

Braj Basi Lal (born in Jhansi, India in 1921) is a well-known Indian archaeologist. He was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972, and has served as President of the World Archaeological Congress. He also worked in for UNESCO committees. He received the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in 2000.

He has done excavations in the Indus Valley Civilization with Mortimer Wheeler and other archaeologists. He has had a spectacularly successful and exemplary archaeological career spanning more than half‑a‑century. He was trained in excavation by the veteran archaeologist, Wheeler at Taxila, Harappa and other famous sites in the forties of the last century. Out of his many pupils Wheeler chose Lal to entrust the excavation of the Early Historic site of Sisupalgarh in Orissa before relinquishing the charge of the Director‑General of Archaeology in India in 1947.

The eminent British archaeologists, Stuart Piggott and D.H. Gordon, in their reviews of B. B. Lal’s classic article on the "Copper Hoards of the Gangetic basin" (Piggott 1954), and his "Hastinapura excavation report" (Gordon 1957), both published in "Ancient India, the annual journal of the Archaeological Survey of India", hailed them as models of research and excavation reporting. In subsequent years Lal excavated the Mesolithic site of Birbhanpur in West Bengal, the Chalcolithic site of Gilund and the Harappan site of Kalibangan, both in Rajasthan, and the Ramayana sites of Ayodhya, Bharadwaj Ashram, Nandigram, Chitrakut and Shringaverapura in Uttar Pradesh.

For his academic achievements and the high quality of his scholarship Professor Lal has been honoured by many prestigious institutions in India and abroad. In 2000, the President of the Indian Republic conferred upon him the coveted title of Padmabhushan.

Works

*The Earliest Civilization of South Asia (1997)
*India 1947-1997: New Light on the Indus Civilization (1998)
*Lal, B.B., (1984) Frontiers of the Indus Civilization.1984.
* Lal, B.B. 2005. The Homeland of the Aryans. Evidence of Rigvedic Flora and Fauna & Archaeology, New Delhi, Aryan Books International.
*Lal, B.B. 2002. The Saraswati Flows on: the Continuity of Indian Culture. New Delhi: Aryan Books International

External links

* [http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/bbl001.html The Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture: Some Thoughts] By Archaeologist B.B. Lal
* [http://www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/bbl002.html Why Perpetuate Myths ? - A Fresh Look at Ancient Indian History] By Archaeologist B.B. Lal
* [http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/19th-century-paradigms.html Let not the 19th century paradigms continue to haunt us!] Inaugural Address, by Prof. Lal, delivered at the 19th International Conference on South Asian Archaeology, 2007