Ajay Yadav

Ajay holds an MA in Ancient History from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), whereas his MPhil dissertation examined the Iraq crisis of 2003. He later completed a Certificate in Sanskrit Computational Linguistics at JNU in 2017. Currently on study leave from the Government of India, which he joined in 2006, Ajay is pursuing his DPhil in Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

From 2019 to 2022, he served in the Ministry of Culture as the Additional Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India. He has participated in several excavations, including Rakhigarhi (2021–22) and Lothal (2025), and has conducted explorations in coastal Gujarat on behalf of the Archaeological Survey of India (2022).

His present research focuses on the Holocene Climatic Optimum and its relationship to settlement patterns along the west coast of the Indian subcontinent.