The Indus civilisation was a Punjab civilisation as much as a Sindh one. Harappa is on an old bed of the Ravi in Sahiwal district. Rakhigarhi in Hisar district is larger in area than Harappa. Kalibangan is on the Ghaggar in Rajasthan. Ropar in Punjab was the first site excavated after independence.
Its cities had grid streets, standardised fired brick in a fixed ratio, covered drains, public wells, granaries and a script that has not been deciphered and may not be a language at all.
There are no palaces, no obvious temples, and very little weaponry. That absence is the most argued-over fact in Indian archaeology.
Harappa was largely dismantled in the 1850s when its brick was taken as ballast for the Lahore to Multan railway. What was excavated afterward is what the contractors did not take.
The concentration of sites along the dry Ghaggar-Hakra channel, more than along the Indus itself, is the strongest evidence that a large river once ran there.
Punjab was urban for a thousand years before the Vedas were composed, and almost nobody who grows up here is taught that the ruins in the next district are theirs.
The civilisation covered a larger area than Egypt and Mesopotamia together, with cities of standardised brick, drainage, weights, and a script nobody can read.
The two Punjabs dig separately and publish separately. A civilisation whose sites are cut down the middle by a border is studied by two archaeologies that do not compare notes, and the people working at Rakhigarhi and the people working at Harappa, three hundred kilometres apart, have never worked together.
Most of the sites in Punjab are mounds under fields. They are being levelled and quarried continuously and there is no state programme to survey or protect them.