Early Harappan

Several periodisations are employed for the periodisation of the Indus Valley Civilisation. While the Indus Valley Civilisation was divided into Early, Mature and Late Harappan by archaeologists like Mortimer Wheeler, newer periodisations include the Neolithic early farming settlements, and use a Stage-Phase model, often combining terminology from various systems.

The most commonly used nomenclature classifies the Indus Valley Civilisation into Early, Mature and Late Harappan Phase. The Indus Civilisation was preceded by local agricultural villages, from where the river plains were populated when water-management became available, creating an integrated civilisation. This broader time range has also been called the Indus Age and the Indus Valley Tradition.

The Early, Mature and Late Harappan periodisation was introduced by archaeologists like Mortimer Wheeler, who "brought with them existing systems from elsewhere, such as the Three Age System," and further developed by Mughal, who "proposed the term Early Harappan to characterize the pre- or protourban phase." This classification is primarily based on Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, assuming an evolutionary sequence. According to Manuel, this division "places the Indus Valley within a tripartite evolutionary framework, of a birth a fluorescence a death of a society in a fashion familiar to the social evolutionary concepts of Elmond Service (1971)."

According to Coningham and Young, it was "cemented [...] in common use" due to "the highly influential British archaeologists Raymond and Bridget Allchin [who] used similar subdivisions in their work." According to Coningham and Young, this approach is "limited" and "restricted," putting too much emphasis on the mature phase.

Shaffer divided the broader Indus Valley Tradition into four eras, the pre-Harappan "Early Food Producing Era," and the Regionalisation, Integration, and Localisation eras, which correspond roughly with the Early Harappan, Mature Harappan, and Late Harappan phases. Each era can be divided into various phases. A phase is an archaeological unit possessing traits sufficiently characteristic to distinguish it from all other units similarly conceived. According to Shaffer, there was considerable regional variation, as well as differences in cultural sequences, and these eras and phases are not evolutionary sequences, and cannot uniformly be applied to every site.

According to Coningham and Young,

A critical feature of Shaffer's developmental framework was replacing the traditional Mesolithic/Neolithic, 'Chalcolithic'/Early Harappan, Mature Harappan and Late Harappan terminology with Eras which were intended to reflect the longer-term changes or processes which provided the platform for eventual complexity and urbanisation [...] Notably, Shaffer's categorisation also allowed scholars to frame sites such as Mehrgarh, accepted by all as partly ancestral to the Indus cities within a distinctly pervasive Indus tradition rather than lying outside a Pre-Urban or incipient urban phase.

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