South Asia (Geographic Keyword)
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This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us at comments@tdar.org.
The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring our Understanding of Socio-Environmental History (2017)
Much scientific debate has focused on the timing and stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. In this paper, we argue that strident debate about the Anthropocene’s chronological boundaries arises because its formal periodization necessarily forces an arbitrary break in a long history of human alteration of environments. The aim of dividing geologic time based on a "step-change" in the global significance of socio-environmental processes goes directly against the socially differentiated and...
The archaeobotany of plant microfossils in South Asia - History and Perspectives (2017)
The analysis of plant microfossils has progressed immensely in recent years. The increase in the number of phytoliths and starch grains works in several disciplines has substantially extended our knowledge about these microfossils, while at the same time diversifying the approaches by which they can be used as archaeological and palaeoenvironmental proxies. This presentation will discuss the history and developments of plant microfossils in South Asia.
Archaeofauna and Archaeobotany studies in Northwestern South Asia: Past, Present, and Future (2017)
Both Zooarchaeological and Paleoethnobotanical studies have been carried out on animal and plant remains from archaeological sites in northwestern South Asia for at least a century. These investigations, while providing important insights into the hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoral economies of the region, have lagged behind those carried out in other parts of the world in both quantity and quality. Indigenous practitioners of both sub-disciplines are few, and interest in these aspects of...
The Archaeological Climate: New Materialisms and Ontologies of the Anthropocene (2015)
Archaeologists have long documented how humans have historically responded to climate changes. With broad scholarly debate over the adoption of the "Anthropocene" to describe the current period of Earth history, they are also contributing to evaluations of how land-use practices historically influenced Earth's climate, arguably since at least the mid-Holocene. While archaeological approaches to past climate changes have much to contribute to the Anthropocene debate, they often uncritically leave...
Aspects of ritual and domestic life in first farming village (PPNB period) : Contribution to Tell Halula (Euphrates Valley Syria) (2015)
In this communication we will deal with the symbolic documents that the archaeological excavation at Tell Halula (Syria) (7800-6500cal BC) have provided. The documents are essentially symbolic paintings representations on the walls of houses, figurines and a rich funerary objects. This documentation provides exceptional discussed the symbolic world of the first farmers while data confronts economic and social communities of emerging farmers. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy...
The baazar side of the Indus Valley: a framework for understanding the merchant economy of the Indus Valley culture. (2016)
The craft industries and trade networks of the Indus Valley are perhaps some of the most well understood and explored aspects of this early South Asian civilization. While the nature of production and spatial distribution of certain commodities are known, it is still uncertain within what form of economic structures these exchanges transpired. This paper proposes that the "bazaar" might provide a suitable framework through which to understand the exchange of these commodities. While bazaars...
Beads, Bangles, and Glass: Historical and Ethnographic Insights into Glass Working in South India (2015)
The contemporary glass bead making village of Papanaidupet in southern Andhra Pradesh has long served as the ethnographic model for understanding ancient South Indian glass working. Recent surveys, conducted as part of the project Production Landscapes of Southern Andhra Pradesh (PLoSAP), have yielded new data about contemporary and recent glass working in this region of south India. These data include a modern glass bangle making community with production links to Papanaidupet as well as an...
Bones of Contention: Further Investigation into the Online Trade in Archaeological and Ethnographic Human Remains (2015)
Within the global antiquities trade, especially that (significant) portion of it conducted online, the size and scope of the trade in archaeological and ethnographic human remains continues to be poorly known. In 2014, the authors researched and published the first comprehensive update of what is known about the online component of this trade c. 2013, conducting common search engine queries over two months to creating a database to record recent or ongoing sales, and then explore questions of...
Borneo rainforest as a social artefact: insights from integrated methodologies in archaeology, ethnography, and environmental science (2016)
Borneo has a 50,000-year record of Homo sapiens’ interactions with rainforest, a history assembled by the inter-disciplinary studies of human occupation evidence in the Niah Caves on the coastal plain of Sarawak. That project involved a collaboration in particular between archaeologists and environmental scientists, with studies for example in geomorphology, palynology, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, palaeobiology, and material culture studies. More recent work by many of the same team in the...
Carnelian Beads of the Indus Tradition and West Asia circa 2600-1900 BC: A comparative study of technological stability and change (2015)
The production of stone beads involves multiple stages of manufacture determined by the available raw materials as well as technological choices made by bead makers and their communities. This paper focuses on technologies associated with the production of carnelian beads during the Harappa Phase (2600-1900 BC) of the Indus Valley region of Pakistan and Western India, and parts of West Asia. Technological change in production and trade can be shown through materials analysis and provenance...
Carving a Space for Jainism: Jain Rock-Cut Caves in Early Historic to Medieval Tamil Nadu, South India (2017)
The ancient temple city of Madurai, Tamil Nadu is flanked on the east and west by a series of granitic hill ranges and inselbergs. Upon many of these hills are caves containing rock-cut beds and inscriptions that record donations to Jain mendicants. Until recently, interest in these caves has been primarily epigraphical with exiguous analysis of their architectural features and use as Jain residences. In fact, the role of Jains in the history of Tamil Nadu, where they currently represent 0.1% of...
China Vegetation Atlas (2001)
his atlas is another summary result of the publication of "Chinese Vegetation" and other monographs by the vegetation ecology workers in China for more than 40 years. It is a basic map of the country's natural resources and natural conditions. It reflects in detail the distribution, horizontal zonality, and vertical zonal distribution patterns of 11 vegetation types, 54 vegetation types of 796 and subgroups, and reflects more than 2,000 plant dominant species in China. This Atlas consists of...
Climate, resources and strategies: simulating prehistoric populations in semi-arid environments (2015)
The aim of this study is to model resource management and decision making among hunter-gatherer and agro-pastoral groups in semi-arid zones in order to explore evolutionary trajectories in relation to (a) the appearance of other specialized groups during the mid-Holocene and (b) environmental variability. The study of coexistence and interaction between groups with different subsistence strategies and land-use behaviours represents an interesting research challenge to understand socio-ecological...
A climatic imperative? Testing the connection between climate and crop adoption in the Indus and the Hexi corridor (2015)
Why might societies adopt new crops or change their cropping patterns? Climate change is one of several possible drivers, but its role in crop exchange has rarely been empirically tested and its importance relative to other factors, particularly cultural factors, remains controversial. As part of the Food Globalisation in Prehistory project, two isotopic studies have aimed to directly test the relationship between climate change and crop movement in particular contexts. One focuses on the Hexi...
Connecting the highlands and lowlands of Bhutan through pilgrimage to sacred sites (2015)
The small Himalayan mountain kingdom of Bhutan is in itself a high land. However within the country there exist many unarticulated highland-lowland dynamics and dichotomies: economic power of the lowlands versus spiritual power of the highlands; modernization and opening of the lowlands versus tradition and closure of the highlands, and so forth. Establishing the right balance between these and others is critical as the country opens up into the 21st Century. This presentation will discuss some...
Conserving the Buddhist stupas and religious nationalism in Sri Lanka (2015)
Surveying, excavating, and conserving Buddhist stupas have been major activities undertaken by Sri Lankan archaeologists since colonial times. Conservation of Buddhist stupas holds an important place in the archaeological agenda of the national institutions in Sri Lanka. I present the elusive concept of ‘authenticity’, treated as the most important criterion in conserving architectural heritage and examine the crisis that emerged when this centerpiece of the Authorized Heritage Discourse was...
Crops Across Eurasia (2018)
Database of appearance of crops, period of use and associated radiocarbon dates across Eurasia
Cultural Change in Funerary Practices from Harappan to Post-Harappan Phases in Proto-Historic India (2017)
Various archaeological sites in the Indian subcontinent namely, Harappa, Kalibangan, Surkotada, Lothal, Daimabad, Bhagwanpura, Navadatoli and Nevasa have been identified as settlements dated to roughly 3000 to 1000 BC. These archaeological sites present evidences of urn burials, which have generally been overlooked in favor of extended burials and cremations, not unlike contemporary funerary practices. In this paper, I examine the distribution pattern of burials and cremations at the above...
Cultural transmissions and indigenous influences: Glazed tiles from Mughal India (2015)
The use of glazed tiles for architectural embellishment in the Islamic world was widely patronised by the Timurids in Central Asia in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, influencing in times to come the decorative traditions of neighbouring lands. In northern India, glazed tiles began to be used in substantial numbers by the Mughals on their buildings in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, in the province of Punjab near the north-west border, and further inland at Delhi. Samples...
Current State of Megalithic Research in Kerala, India (2017)
Megalithic studies in Kerala started with the discovery, excavation and publication of burial site at Chattaparamba in Kozhikode district by James Babington in 1819. While a number of archaeological investigations on Megaliths in Kerala have been carried out since then, very few of them document the location, distribution and nature of these monuments. Megalithic burials are highly visible on the landscape and are often subject to excavation, yet, we currently lack an understanding of the...
Datasets used for d'Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky (In Review)
This collection contains the datasets used to support d'Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky (In Review). It contains: 1.) the China Vegetation Atlas 2.) A database containing records for appearance and period of usage of crops across Eurasia.
Developing a Legacy Collection of Traditional Rice Cultivation: Implications for Archaeobotanical Study (2017)
Legacy ethnobotanical collections have untapped potential to elucidate human-plant relationships through time and space. This paper examines a subset of a comprehensive ethnobotanical collection undertaken in 1979-1981 in northeast Thailand. The subset comprises 43 traditional rice cultivars and wild forms, each collected along with detailed information about cultivar-specific uses and growing conditions. Our study includes morphometric examination of grains and spikelet bases with the objective...
Does the Site-Size Hierarchy Concept Mask the Complexity of Urban-Hinterland Relations? (2017)
The site-size hierarchy concept was born of a marriage between a long-standing interest in the emergence of the state and the mid-twentieth-century development of systematic regional survey projects. The assumption of equivalence between sites and territorial complexity facilitated an intellectual investment in survey data beyond a mere tally of sites towards an analysis of the way in which political administrations functioned at the landscape scale. The resultant easy equivalence of four-tiered...
Embedding Artificial Intelligence in Agent-Based Models (2015)
Agent-Based Models (ABMs) have been increasingly used to study social phenomena, from the emergence of social norms to population dynamics or cultural transmission processes. Key to this method of computational simulation is the tension for explaining how macroscopic phenomena emerge from the interaction of agents behaving in a plausible manner. However, the behavior is too often encoded as a simple set of condition-action rules. We consider this kind of rule-based behaviour too simplistic,...