Gujarat's Lothal?

1. Harbour engineering. Berth walls, a sluice or channel, mooring posts, anchor stones, steps down to water. A 'port' is a claim about built infrastructure, not merely about goods arriving. The site has none reported.

2. Storage and administration. Warehouses, granaries and, above all, standardised weights and sealings in stratified context. These are what show goods being measured, recorded and stored. The site has one unstratified seal and no weights.

3. A dated, stratified sequence. Pottery and radiocarbon dates from layers, not from a farm track. This decides whether the material belongs to one occupation and when. The site has none; nothing has been excavated.

4. A navigable water body. Sediment cores showing marine or tidal conditions, and a channel connecting the depression to the sea in the relevant period. Not tested; the depression could be a natural lagoon, an old channel, or a silted tank.

What the site does have is a scatter of beads, pottery and a seal - consistent with a coastal settlement in contact with Harappan networks, and worth protecting. But contact is not a port, and a single seal with an unread sign is not proof of Harappan administration.

Rule to state in the answer: the claimant carries the burden of proof. Missing evidence is not disproof, but it does mean the claim is premature.

Why it matters Burnt brick in standardised proportions, together with drains and street alignments, is one of the markers of Harappan urban planning. If the site were a port of Lothal's kind, we would expect substantial brick construction - dock walls, a warehouse platform, drains. Its absence means the site does not look like an integrated Harappan town, and it weakens the comparison the researcher is making.

Why it is not conclusive

1. Many Harappan-affiliated sites are not brick towns. In Kutch and Saurashtra, smaller settlements used stone, mud brick and rubble; brick is a feature of the large planned centres.
2. Bricks are robbed and buried. Brick is valuable and is recycled; a farm track cutting the mound may have removed or obscured structures, and nothing has been excavated below the surface.
3. Absence may be a sampling artefact. Surface survey is a poor instrument for detecting buried architecture.
4. The site could be a local community trading with Harappans rather than a Harappan settlement - in which case the beads and seal are imports, and a brick dock was never expected.

Reasoning point for the answer: an argument from absence is only as strong as the search that was made. Here the search was surface collection, so the absence of bricks is a reason for caution, not a refutation - and equally not a licence to call the site a port.

Model comment (about 140 words) 'The finds reported from the Saurashtra site - carnelian beads, a broken steatite seal and red-brown pottery - are consistent with a coastal settlement in contact with Harappan networks, and the site deserves protection and proper study before the farm track destroys it. They are not yet evidence of a port. Nothing has been excavated, so there is no stratified sequence or date; no brick structure, drain, weight or mooring has been recorded; and the 200 m depression could be a natural lagoon, an old channel or a silted tank. Calling the site "Gujarat's Lothal" moves faster than the evidence, because a port is a claim about harbour works and administration, not only about imported goods.'

What would change my mind: a dated, stratified occupation sequence, sediment evidence for a tidal inlet open in that period, and any built structure for berthing or storage - any one of these would move the site from 'trading contact' towards 'port', and all three together would settle it.