The analysis of contacts and interactions has always played an important role in archaeological studies. Models developed by archaeologists seek to explain the presence of non-native artifacts in indigenous cultures and reconstruct the processes that brought them there. In January 2003, excavators working at Gilund, an Ahar-Banas culture site located in the Indian province of Rajasthan, uncovered a cache of seal impressions that strongly resemble material known from Southeastern Iran and Central Asia. While the use of seals for administration has a long history in the ancient Near East, the seals and sealings uncovered at Gilund present us with a class of materials and a technology that were heretofore unknown in this part of South Asia. The sites of the Ahar-Banas were located far from the urban centers of Iran and Central Asia and had limited contact with these areas. Nonetheless, the discoveries at Gilund suggest that the people of this region were aware of the technologies and iconographies of lands far to their west, and in fact adapted them to their own needs.

The seals and sealings from Gilund provide an important corpus of material that is used to discuss the mechanisms of transfer of administrative technologies and iconographies across great distances. While the materials from Gilund were locally produced, the foreign origin of the sealing technology and the iconography is clear. Additionally, chronological analysis of the material shows that the local production was affected by the constantly shifting patterns of Indo-Iranian contact. This suggests that the towns of the Ahar-Banas were not as isolated from the interconnected world of third and early second millennium Middle Asia as previously believed. This dissertation is a study of the how people at the furthest edges of an interaction sphere are affected by and react to the changes at their borders and has two principal aims: (a) to describe and classify the glyptic system used in the Ahar-Banas, both in terms of iconography and function; and (b) to determine the origins of the technologies and iconographies found at these sites and the mechanisms and routes by which they arrived.