Bhirrana, also Bhirdana and Birhana, (IAST: Bhirḍāna) is an archaeological site, located in a small village in the Fatehabad district of the north Indian state of Haryana. Bhirrana's earliest archaeological layers contained two charcoal samples dating to the 8th-7th millennium BCE, predating the Indus Valley civilisation, but occurring in the same levels with Hakra Ware pottery which had been dated to the 4th millennium BCE in other sites of the region, as well as "about half a dozen" other charcoal samples from the early levels of Bhirrana dated 3200-2600 BCE, and smelted copper artefacts indicating a Chalcolithic rather than Neolithic stage of development. The site is one of the many sites seen along the channels of the seasonal Ghaggar river, identified by ASI archeologists to be the Post-IVC, Rigvedic Saraswati river of c. 1500 BCE.
Scholarly interpretation and dating of Bhirrana, as with a number of other archaeological sites of ancient India, has been subject to contestation regarding the methodologies and ideology of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI): many senior officials of the ASI have been "embroiled in controversies" over pseudo-"scientific" efforts to legitimate the Hindutva ideology which identifies the ancient Harappans (incorrectly) with the Vedas and Sanskrit, in order to synthesize the nationalist narrative of Indian civilization as indigenous and continuous since its beginning, allegedly originating from the banks of the Saraswati River (rather than the Indus). A superintending archaeologist of the Bhirrana excavations was quoted as promoting the association of Harappans with the Vedas and the Saraswati river, and questions are being raised about the scientific quality of the excavations. Archaeologist Gregory Possehl—a leading expert of the Indus Valley civilization—expressed reservations "about temporal assertions made on the basis of radiocarbon dates" from Bhirrana.
