Braj Basi Lal (born in Jhansi, India in 1921), better known as B. B. Lal, is an Indian archaeologist. He was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972, and has served as President of the World Archaeological Congress. He also worked in for UNESCO committees. He received the Padma Bhushan award by the Government of India in 2000.
He has done excavations in the Indus Valley Civilization with Mortimer Wheeler and other archaeologists. He has had an archaeological career spanning more than half‑a‑century. He was trained in excavation by the veteran archaeologist, Wheeler at Taxila, Harappa and other sites in the 1940s. Out of his many pupils Wheeler chose Lal to entrust the excavation of the early historic site of Sisupalgarh in Orissa before relinquishing the charge of the Director General of Archaeology in India in 1947.
The British archaeologists, Stuart Piggott and D.H. Gordon, in their reviews of B. B. Lal’s classic article on the Copper Hoards of the Gangetic basin (Piggott 1954), and his Hastinapura excavation report (Gordon 1957), both published in Ancient India, the annual journal of the Archaeological Survey of India, hailed them as models of research and excavation reporting. In subsequent years Lal excavated the mesolithic site of Birbhanpur in West Bengal, the Chalcolithic site of Gilund and the Harappan site of Kalibangan, both in Rajasthan, and the Ramayana sites of Ayodhya, Bharadwaj Ashram, Nandigram, Chitrakut and Shringaverapura in Uttar Pradesh.