It was early morning at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) excavation site at Bhirrana. The mechanized roar of passing tractors along with the sound of chirping birds broke my sleep. It was my first day at the site. I had arrived the previous evening from Baror, another ASI site in Sri Ganganagar district in Rajasthan, around 20 kilometers away from the Pakistan border. Bhirrana was in the Fatehabad district of Haryana, located next to a bustling village of the same name. After breakfast at the campsite canteen, I was soon walking on the excavation mound. The 30,000 square meter site was less than 50 meters away from the ASI camp. It was separated by a nondescript district road on which plied the occasional state transport buses and local tractors (IAR 2003–04 2011, 43). The excavation mound, rising 5 meters above the road, was neatly divided into many dozen squares. Around 100 workers were busy in the various activities typical of an excavation site—digging, cleaning, and hauling the excavated soil to a dump at the edge of the mound. At one corner of the site, I located the site director—the superintending archaeologist (SA) of the ASI Excavation Branch (Ex. Br.) 1, Nagpur. He was a man in his mid-fifties, donning a white, cotton, wide-brim cricket hat. The SA was engrossed in overseeing a group of women workers, giving instructions as they meticulously cleaned a trench with brushes of varying sizes. He was reputed to be one of the best field archaeologists of the ASI, who had spent a large part of his earlier career in the 1980s and 1990s working at the Harappan sites of Banawali (Haryana) and Dholavira (Gujarat). According to my informants, he was an “old Harappan hand” and now headed the best excavation branch of the ASI—the Nagpur Ex. Br.

Bhirrana was discovered in 1982. Ineffective protection by the Haryana Department of Archaeology and Museums meant that a football field, an abandoned Muslim cemetery, and the mud huts of Dalit encroachers now crowded the site (Rao et al. 2004; IAR 2003–04 2011, 42–56). The excavation began 20 years after the site's discovery, in 2003–04, under the ideological aegis of the Saraswati Heritage Project (SHP), and continued for three seasons until the spring of 2006. My ethnographic work was conducted in its second season of excavation in 2004–05.