The Decline of the Indus River Valley Civilization
Storyboard Text
- Why are the rains not coming??
- Around 2500 BCE, the intensity of summer monsoons in the Indus River Valley began to decrease.
- We can’t grow food because we don’t have enough water…
- This caused droughts and making agriculture difficult, and was especially terrible for a society that relied heavily on floods for irrigation.
- Wow, new land!
- The Indo-Aryan people were also moving into the region at this time and may have driven the people living in the region previously out.
- This ultimately caused people to migrate to the Himalayan foothills, causing a shift of a civilization with mostly large cities to one of mostly small farming villages.
- Eventually, researchers backed these theories by studying the isotopic concentrations of stalagmites on the floor of a cave in the region. By finding the general pattern of rainfall over the past 5700 years, they concluded that summer monsoons declined leading to the increased droughts around the same time the civilization collapsed.
- I’m glad we moved out!
- Although climate change and droughts were probably not the entire cause of the collapse of the Indus River Valley civilization, it was definitely a contributor.
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