PUNE: Bronze Age merchants crossing Gujarat stopped at well-organized roadside amenities that supplied shelter, meals, safety and stables for his or her pack animals.A brand new multidisciplinary examine by Pune-based Deccan Faculty Publish-Graduate and Analysis Institute, Symbiosis Faculty for Liberal Arts, and Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), New Delhi, revealed in L’Anthropologie (Elsevier, 2025), has recognized a 4,000-year-old Harappan settlement at Kotada Bhadli in Kutch because the earliest recognized caravanserai — a fortified rural stopover that supported long-distance commerce between 2300 and 1900 BCE. The findings now push again the origins of organized commerce infrastructure within the subcontinent by over 2,000 years.Lead researcher Prabodh Shirvalkar from Deccan Faculty informed TOI: “That is the primary confirmed archaeological proof of a caravanserai within the Harappan world — a sort of infrastructure beforehand recognized solely from later historic durations.”Excavated between 2010 and 2013 in collaboration with Gujarat State Archeology Division, the location has now been reinterpreted utilizing superior strategies—together with floor penetrating radar, magnetic and satellite tv for pc. surveys, isotopic and lipid analyses, and three types of courting, Shirvalkar added.Researchers, together with Esha Prasad and Yadubirsingh Rawat, stated the discovering bridges a key lacking hyperlink within the commerce mechanism of the Indus Valley Civilization, revealing how long-distance overland commerce was. supported by an organized system of relaxation stops and logistical hubs — a construction beforehand thought to have emerged solely within the early historic or medieval durations.Whereas the existence of Harappan commerce with Mesopotamia and inland India is well-established, the mechanism of how retailers, animals and items really moved throughout land remained unclear. The brand new examine proposes that Harappan commerce trusted a community of small fortified stopovers, strategically positioned alongside commerce routes between city facilities like Dholavira, Lothal and Shikarpur in Gujarat.Earlier excavations revealed a multi-roomed central constructing, fortified partitions with bastions, and enormous open areas that have been seemingly used to carry animals and items — all per a caravanserai’s format.Shirvalkar added that the location was small, strategically positioned and fortified, however non-urban — designed for brief halts somewhat than everlasting residence. By figuring out caravanserai-like traits — fortification, animal pens, open areas, meals waste and imported items — the paper stated that Harappans maintained an organized commerce infrastructure two millennium earlier than Silk Highway,“The Harappan financial system was not nearly metropolis markets and ports like Dholavira or Lothal. It had a logistical spine. Caravanserais that sustained merchants on lengthy inland routes,” Shirvalkar stated.