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.
Periodisations
The most commonly used nomenclature classifies the Indus Valley civilisation into early, mature, and late Harappan phases. The Indus Valley 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 Tradition.
Early, Mature, and Late Harappan
Early surveys by Sir Aurel Stein in Balochistan led to the discovery of numerous prehistoric sites of unknown association. Following excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, the prehistoric sites in Sindh and Baluchistan were thought to represent a culture that migrated from Baluchistan to the Indus Valley to establish the Indus Valley Civilisation. This notion was refuted by M.R. Mughal based on his discovery of earlier occupational phases in the Cholistan Desert. The term Early Harappan was coined by M. R. Mughal in his dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania which provided a synthesis of his many surveys and studies throughout Pakistan. 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 the birth, fluorescence, and death of a society in a fashion familiar to the social evolutionary concepts of Elman 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: Harappan Tradition
Scholarship in archaeology commonly uses a variation of the Three-age system developed by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen to divide past societies into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. Although this system is very useful for its original purpose of organizing museum collections, it is unable to fully characterize the dynamic and fluid nature of human inter-settlement relationships. To address this issue, archaeologists Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips developed a system based on Culture-Historical Integration, or a heuristic concept for describing the distribution of "relatedness" across time and space. These concepts were later adapted by Jim G. Shaffer and Diane Liechtenstein as a potential solution to a similar problem in the Greater Indus Valley.
During his archaeological research in Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Pakistan, and India, Shaffer observed the fluid and adaptive nature of local customs in rural South Asia and the many ways that cultural practices interfaced with material culture. Based on both his extensive work in the field and these ethnographic observations, Shaffer developed a series of important critiques of archaeological theory. Shaffer and Liechtenstein argued that the colonial legacy of Mortimer Wheeler and Stuart Piggot led to the projection of colonial stereotypes onto the ancient past. As a result of these critiques, Shaffer adapted the system developed by Willey and Phillips into one suitable for the Indus Valley Civilisation. In his original publication, this complex social formation was termed the Harappan Tradition, after the type site at Harappa, Punjab. This term Tradition stems from his concept of Cultural Tradition or the "persistent configuration of basic technologies, as well as structure, in the context of geographical and temporal continuity".
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,