Ancient civilisations depended heavily on natural fuel resources for a wide array of activities, and this had an impact on such resources that can be traced in the archaeological record. At its urban apex, the populations of the Indus Civilisation (2600-1900 BC) produced a wide range of objects and crafts, several of which involved highly specialised pyrotechnology. In the wake of increasing ar...

Arsenic-contaminated aquifers are currently estimated to affect ~150 million people around the world. However, the full extent of the problem remains elusive. This is also the case in Pakistan, where previous studies focused on isolated areas. Using a new data set of nearly 1200 groundwater quality samples throughout Pakistan, we have created state-of-the-art hazard and risk maps of arsenic-con...

Deep sea channel systems are recognized in most submarine fans worldwide as well as in the geological record. The Indus Fan is the second largest modern submarine fan, having a well-developed active canyon and deep sea channel system. Previous studies from the upper Indus Fan have reported several active channel systems. In the present study, deep sea channel systems were identified within the ...

Pakistan is highly dependent on water resources originating in the mountain sources of the upper Indus for irrigated agriculture which is the mainstay of its economy. Hence any change in available resources through climate change or socio-economic factors could have a serious impact on food security and the environment. In terms of both ratio of withdrawals to runoff and per-capita water availa...

Standardized corpora of undeciphered scripts, a necessary starting point for computational epigraphy, requires laborious human effort for their preparation from raw archaeological records. Automating this process through machine learning algorithms can be of significant aid to epigraphical research. Here, we take the first steps in this direction and present a deep learning pipeline that takes ...

Angle dispersive x-ray diffraction (ADXRD) is a basic non destructive tool for the determination of crystal structure. Energy tunability and high flux are added advantages in using synchrotron radiation (SR) source for ADXRD technique. We have installed an ADXRD beamline (BL-12) on Indus-2, the Indian synchrotron source. Indus-2 is a 2.5GeV, 300mA SR source. The beamline consists of a Si (311) ...

The present study aims to find out an optimum policy for pumping out the optimized volume of groundwater obtained from the authors' earlier Two Level Optimization Model [N.K. Garg, A. Ali, 1998. Two level optimization model for Lower Indus Basin. Agric. Water Manage. 36, 1±21] for the Dadu Canal Command of the Lower Indus Basin. It is shown that the tubewells in this canal command may be operat...

Flood wave propagation in river channel flow can be enunciated by nonlinear equations of motion for unsteady flow. It is difficult to find analytical solution of these non-linear equations. Hence, in this paper verification of the finite element model has been carried out against available numerical predictions and field data. The results of the model indicate a good matching with both Preissma...

Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To date, there is no generally accepted decipherment of these sign sequences, and there have been suggestions that the signs could be non-linguistic. Here we apply complex n...