South Asia (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (82 Records)
Water tanks, sump pits, street drains, toilets, sewage drains, shaft wells, bathing platforms and other waste management amenities are among the visible landmarks of the cities of the Indus civilization. While they did provide conveniences for city dwellers, there were certain inequities in the types of amenities associated with individual households, but it was in the interest of all to keep the system in working order. There is no direct evidence for the complex network and infrastructural...
Father's Brother's Daughter Marriage in Kurdistan (1986)
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Fish Remains in an Early Village Context: Provisioning during the Ravi Phase of the Indus Valley Tradition (Pakistan) (2016)
Fish remains from the earliest deposits at the Indus Valley site of Harappa (Punjab Province, Pakistan) appear to have skeletal element distribution and cut mark patterns that are different from later deposits associated with a more complex social organization related to an urban setting. The earliest village-level fish assemblages (Ravi Phase) appear to be representative of the types of provisioning associated with direct access to either the fish resources or the fish mongers; later...
Fishers and Farmers in northern Kerala: Preliminary Results from the Northern Kerala Archaeological Project (NorKAP) (2017)
Conventional narratives of Indian history tend to focus on agricultural communities and have typically underestimated the role of fishing and fishers. With over 7500 km of coastline along present day India, there is great potential for examining how fishing traditions changed and continued through time, and how they might have facilitated social complexification typically associated with agricultural communities. This paper will present preliminary survey results from the Northern Kerala...
From Rojdi to Harappa and Beyond: Regional Variation in the Indus Civilization (2017)
Steve Weber's pioneering research on botanical remains and environment has provided foundational studies for subsistence and settlement in the Indus civilization. Results of his field research at Harappa in the Punjab, Rojdi in Gujarat, and Farmana in Haryana focused in three key areas where major Indus centers were established. Differences in archaeobotanical remains provided a firm basis from plant remains and long-term agricultural packages in the three regions. These ranged from...
From Scatterplots to Statistics: Identifying the Local Isotope Range in Multivariate Data (2016)
In recent decades, isotopic assays of strontium, lead, and oxygen in biological remains have revolutionized archaeological migration studies by providing direct evidence for the occurrence, timing, and geographic origins of individual residence change. Such research requires the clear identification of ‘local’ isotopic baselines for comparison against assayed individuals, and yet no single method to accomplish this task has emerged as best practice. Some researchers advocate the use of commensal...
From wild rice harvesting to domestic rice agriculture in South Asia. (2015)
It is still unclear if India saw an independent domestication of rice, and so the origins of Oryza sativa indica, as distinct from the Chinese rice O. s. japonica, are shrouded in mystery. However, there is very early evidence dating to c.9000 BP of wild rice exploitation, and perhaps of crop management, from Northern India. Once rice becomes widely reported within the archaeobotanic record, there is long term evidence for low impact agrarian practices across the subcontinent, including shifting...
Gendered Heritage: Interspaces and Intersubjectivity (2016)
Ideally, the intersubjectivity of heritage work creates space for the interaction of multiple gendered viewpoints maintaining a collective tension where heritage work flourishes in consideration of multiple lens, multiple meanings, and multiple gendered interpretations. The reality; however, is much further from the rhetoric. In medieval South Asia gender performance was a habituated component of the collective and individual social project. It remains so today. In this paper I work to consider...
GEOARCHAEOLOGICAL ISSUES IN LAGO RICO ACHAEOLOGICAL SITE, CENTRAL PLATEAU OF BRAZIL (2015)
The first results of the archaeological research being developed at the interfluve of the Peixe and Araguaia rivers, indicate the possibility to applying geoarchaeological issues to address a number of issues related to the Lago Rico site, on the left bank of the Peixe river. This site features cultural remains in a section of a low slope as well as two other areas. The first in the alluvial terrace by a lagoon and the second in the floodplain, upstream of the first section, evidencing the...
Harappan urbanites: Standardization, ratios and subjectivity (2015)
Hallmarks of the third millennium BCE Harappan civilization include baked bricks, weights and measures, and water wells, which index centralized control, civic management and urban planning. In this study, I aim to locate the Harappan in a Harappan urban environment. I will consider the ways in which the use of space, design, and architecture may inform the constructions of self. Furthermore, I will interrogate the ancient urban form by considering ratios and standardization as a means to...
Haunting and the Politics of South Asian Archaeology: Stories of three Jinn-haunted ruins (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. In this paper I will look at stories of three jinn-haunted ruins in contemporary South Asia: The Moti Masjid in the Lahore Fort, parts of the abandoned Mughal capital of Fatehpur Sikri, and the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi. All three are associated with South Asia’s pre-colonial Muslim rulers, and all three are sites associated with...
"Hindutva's Rediscovery/Appropriation of its Ancient Past (2017)
Religious proponents are increasingly challenging academic research on India and its religious past. Book burnings, petitions, and even riots, have resulted when religious adherents have felt maligned by the scholarship of academic archaeologists and historians. In my presentation, I will introduce and clarify the complicated history and major debates regarding key archaeological finds in South Asia. In particular, I will discuss debates regarding the history of the "Aryan" and the ...
"I don’t know all of these stories": Method and Intention in Community-Oriented Research and Heritage Projects (2016)
Scholars who conduct engaged and collaborative research and heritage projects often warn against treating participants as homogeneous communities who speak with a unified voice. Gender provides a useful lens to combat this tendency and to create a reflexive, action-oriented archaeology. This paper will discuss the role of gender, intersectionality, and intersubjectivity in method and intention in archaeological practices. Current projects in Georgia, USA and Rajasthan, India will be used to...
Innovations under limitations: A landscape approach to agricultural practices and water management in a frontier zone of medieval South India. (2015)
Agricultural intensification and water management are widely studied in the context of changing political complexity. My research, centered on semi-arid southern India, addresses this theme through a survey of three areas that exemplify the diversity of archaeological sites and trajectories of change in the Raichur region. Irrigation played a significant role in the expansion and intensification of agriculture in this region, achieved through the construction of reservoirs that conserved surface...
Invented, Adopted, Shared, Acquired, Inspired? Technological Change and the Talc-Faience Complexes of the Indus Valley Tradition (2015)
A bewildering assortment of materials utilizing siliceous pastes were used to make small objects such as figures, beads and containers, in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Mediterranean, and regions beyond and between. From very early beginnings in the sixth millennium BCE or earlier in some regions, the assortment of these materials reached great diversity of production technique and material in the third and second millennia BCE, with much less diversity of appearance. In...
Invisible Value: Steatite in the Faience Complexes of the Indus Valley Tradition (2017)
Faience (composition, frit or siliceous paste) was widespread, special, and yet everyday across much of Eurasia for well over a millennium, yet hardly known today. These materials were made with many different recipes and production methods, but there is an unusual, apparently unique, variation in faience composition for some objects in the Indus. Some siliceous paste objects include steatite fragments, invisible on the surface and requiring laboratory analysis for detection. These could be...
Iron and Glass: Reconstructing (Overlapping) Technologies in Early South India (2015)
Recent survey fieldwork undertaken as part of the ongoing project, Production Landscapes of Southern Andhra Pradesh (PLoSAP), has revealed a complex material landscape. The scale and variety of the remains seem to indicate that various technologies – and especially pyro-technologies – were consistently present in this area, while the spatial distribution of the remains suggests that these technologies were differentially distributed across the survey areas. A more detailed analysis of the...
The Kapoor Case: International collaboration on antiquities provenance research (2015)
Manhattan antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor faces trial in India as the alleged mastermind of an international idol smuggling network. A year-long investigation by researchers, journalists, art aficionados and law enforcement on three continents established the illicit origins for more than a dozen ancient objects allegedly trafficked by Kapoor. In September 2014, Australian museums returned two of those objects to India -- a 10th century Shiva Nataraja purchased by the National Gallery of...
The labor of making: Crafting ceramics in Medieval South India (2021)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper explores the question of labor in the study of crafted objects from archaeological contexts. Working with an assemblage of excavated ceramics from a Medieval (12th-14th century CE) settlement at Maski (northern Karnataka), it problematizes the categories proposed by the political-economy oriented framework of “craft production...
Land-Use and Social Networking of the Indus Civilization Explored with Stable Isotopes in Faunal Remains (2016)
The region of Gujarat was the southernmost extension of the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 B.C.), South Asia’s first experiment with urban society. In this region, distinctively Indus material culture was made and used at a series of small, monumentally walled manufacturing and trading centers situated along coastal trade and travel corridors that have often been interpreted as colonies established to facilitate the exploitation of the region’s rich natural resources. With the decline of Indus...
The Lost Dead of China: Why Does Hong Kong Retain the Unowned and Unclaimed Dead from the Chinese Diaspora of the 19th and 20th Centuries? (2017)
The 19th and 20th century Chinese diaspora directly contributed to the economic and social development of many nations in the Asia-Pacific region. It also had one unforeseen effect as many if not most Chinese who traveled overseas to seek safety or economic gain for themselves and their family had a deep-rooted desire to have their corpse returned for burial to their home village in China, as evidenced by the wreck SS Ventnor whose hold carried the remains of almost 500 Chinese from the New...
Low intensity cultivation and domestication: pathways to millet domestication in India and China (2017)
The steppe zone of northern China and the savanna zones of India both produced indigenous domestication of numerous small-grained Panicoid cereals, i.e. millets. This presentation will explore parallels in the processes of domestication of these crops, including comparisons of ecological characteristics of wild progenitors, the seasonal mobility of early cultivators, and shared domestication traits and the current state of the their documentation in archaeobotanical evidence. Millets for the...
The Materiality of Domestic Space: Indor Khera, North India, 200 BCE- 500 CE (2017)
Most State and University-sponsored excavations in India have tended to focus on public and elite spaces, in keeping with nationalistic aims of projecting a grandiose view of the past. This has led to the inevitable marginalization of non-elite domestic spaces. One of the few cases of household archaeology in the Indian subcontinent has come from Indor Khera in the Upper Ganga Plains in northern India. Archaeological data recovered during the excavations has given valuable information on the...
Materializing Nationhood: the Many Roles of Built Landscape Management Policy in Post-Partition India and Pakistan (2017)
This paper discusses built landscape management policies put in place during the aftermath of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. It is argued that the management of out-migrant associated buildings (both monumental and residential) was influenced by three divergent goals of nationhood: (1) modernization, (2) secularism, and (3) cultural cohesion. These goals pointed towards conflicting actions. Providing shelter to millions of incoming refugees required the hasty allocation of dwelling...
Microregions and Materiality: Artifact Analysis at Panchmata, India (2017)
Regional, landscape, and spatial analyses in South Asia are often conducted at large scales in order to encompass all potential sites that share a common material culture, polity, or economic system. As these analyses often overlap with culture history designations and simultaneously span multiple geographic and environmental conditions, they can obscure material diversity and human-environment relations. This paper carefully considers scale of analysis and argues that microregions, small areas...