According to Arrian, the Greek historian, the region that extends west of the Hab River, which divides Sindh in the east from Las Bela in Balochistan in the west, has been known since the Hellenistic times to have been settled by the Oreitai, an ethnic group similar to the Ichthyophagi (McCrindle, 1973), although no archaeological trace of their presence has ever been recorded during the surveys made in the area (De Cardi, 1983; Khan, 1964, 1979; Raikes, 1967–1968; Stein, 1943). In effect the first traces of prehistoric shellfish eaters were discovered by chance, when Professor A. R. Khan of Karachi University showed me, in his museum, a few decolored specimens of Terebralia palustris mangrove shells he had collected a few years before along the shores of a small bay called Daun, some 15 km south of Cape Gadani, in Las Bela province. A brief visit paid to Daun in January 2000 led to the discovery of a few shell middens (Biagi, 2003–2004, 2004, 2013), while many others were recovered...
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Acknowledgment
The author is very grateful to Dr. R. Nisbet and A. Girod, who took part in the Las Bela surveys, for providing Figures 11, 16 and 30 (R.N.) and for the identification of the marine shells (A.G.), and to Dr. T. Fantuzzi for the calibration of the radiocarbon dates.
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Biagi, P. (2014). Shell Middens of the Coast of Balochistan. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10169-1
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