Overview
Mehrgarh stands near the Bolan Pass on the Kachi plain, Balochistan, west of the later Indus urban belt. Jean-François Jarrige and the French Archaeological Mission to Pakistan excavated from 1974 to 1986 and again in the 1990s. Period I (from about 7000 BCE) is aceramic: mudbrick compartments, barley and wheat, cattle, sheep, and goats, with bitumen-coated baskets instead of pottery.
Later periods add painted pottery, copper, a large cemetery, and some of the earliest evidence for cotton and for dentistry (drilled molars). The site is a village sequence, not a Bronze Age metropolis. It supplies the farming and craft baseline for Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Flooding and erosion have damaged exposed baulks; much of the record lives in publication and in Pakistani museums.
Mehrgarh is the reason "Indus civilisation" does not begin with street drains. The drains come later. The farming village comes here.
