Asia: South Asia (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Morrison.

Tropical environments vary significantly in terms of rainfall and seasonality; these differences make a difference in the kinds of land use strategies that work over the long term. This paper reviews some of the opportunities and constraints of tropical environments in South Asia, considering the range of land use practices deployed over the last 6,000 years in this region. I argue that some practices which could be called sustainable also come at a high cost in terms of human dignity,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kanika Kalra.

Every June through September, the inhabitants of South Asia welcome and celebrate the southwest monsoons. The monsoon winds are the lifeline of this region but also a major threat, inspiring societies to devise mechanisms to both harness their potential and subvert the damage they may cause. This paper analyzes prehistoric and historical responses to monsoons in South Asia in terms of their unpredictable nature, and examines how the monsoons both facilitate and constrict people’s actions. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thomas Fenn. Laure Dussubieux. Shinu Abraham. Alok Kanungo.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Glass—and particularly the glass bead—was a common commodity of Indian Ocean trade, beginning as early as the mid-first millennium BCE and continuing through the second millennium CE. While existing elemental and isotopic analyses of glass beads recovered from outside India have identified glass production recipes likely from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Green. Iqtedar Alam. Claudette Lopez. Cameron Petrie.

This is an abstract from the "To Have and Have Not: A Progress Report on the Global Dynamics of Wealth Inequality (GINI) Project" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of South Asia challenges theories about the deep history of inequality, but data from its first cities are rarely included in comparative studies. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a preliminary analysis of spatial data produced by the early twentieth-century...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mudit Trivedi.

This paper presents the results of an extended project directed at an archaeological investigation of religious conversion to Islam in South Asia. The project combined extensive regional survey, excavations and architectural documentation focused upon the site and valley of Indor, located in the region of Mewat on the borders of Rajasthan, North India. The medieval residents of Mewat were stereotyped in contemporary imperial chronicles as primitive rebels, living in a forested hilly backwater,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Silverman.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research aims to assess whether — and if so, how — pilgrims and individuals traveling to the pilgrimage site of Anuradhapura during the Early Historic (340 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.), Late Historic (200 C.E. to 600 C.E.) and Early Medieval (600 C.E. to 1200 C.E.) periods can be represented through the deposition of ritual material culture within...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sneh Patel.

Rita Wright’s pioneering work on the ceramic stylistic and technological traditions of the Indo-Iranian borderlands highlighted the potential of new theoretical approaches to our understanding of cultural boundaries within South Asia. This work highlighted the complex nature of technology and style boundaries within specific contexts of cultural interaction. This paper takes inspiration from Dr. Wright’s work and applies this framework to another frontier of the Indus: the northwestern state of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Petrie.

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The urban phase of South Asia’s Indus Civilization (ca. 2600–1900 BC) does not offer simple parallels to other contemporary complex societies. This paper will present new insights into Indus settlement networks and the diversity of Indus urbanism. There were apparently only four large-scale (80+ ha) Indus settlements, which were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Uzma Rizvi.

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper revisits how landscape and mineral extraction have been contextualized in the third millennium BCE, Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex (GJCC), Rajasthan, India. The GJCC has very specific formations of sites around resource-high regions particular to this landscape and time period that demonstrate a focus on copper production...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sneh Patel.

This is an abstract from the "Farm to Table Archaeology: The Operational Chain of Food Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE, the western Indian state of Gujarat was home to a regional expression of Harappan culture known as the Sorath Harappans. This cultural group was composed of a network of farmers, herders, and craftsmen that subsided on an economy based on cattle herding and the farming of summer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary A. Davis.

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Indus Civilization of Bronze Age Pakistan and Northwest India (c. 3800-1900 BCE) had a complex system of productions, consumption, and exchange at local, regional, and interregional scales. I join my recent research of intra-site production patterns and regional GIS analysis...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mary A. Davis.

The site of Harappa, Pakistan, was a major urban center of the Indus Civilization with over two thousand years of occupation (3700-1700 BCE). The site did not have an obvious civic ceremonial center but was instead multi-nodal with walled sub-divisions. As an aspect of stone tool assemblage analysis at the site, the most functionally relevant attributes of the blade tools were differentially weighted to produce a soft hierarchical clustering classification scheme. These classes are considered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ayushi Nayak. Michael Petraglia. Nicole Boivin. Patrick Roberts.

The origin of agriculture is a long-standing and pivotal point of archaeological research. The focus, however, has predominantly been on the earliest instances of crop domestication, whereas less is known about the nature of early farming. South Asia with its mosaic of environments and early farming strategies demonstrates the need for nuanced attention to aspects of early agro-ecologies such as manuring, water management strategies, and animal husbandry. Stable isotope analysis of botanical,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clare Kreuzwieser. Paul Nick Kardulias.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this study, I examine how the Elephanta Caves (500 C.E. - 900 C.E.), off the coast of Mumbai, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, can best be preserved in the future. These man-made caves were a place of Shiva and goddess-worship for local Hindus, up until Portuguese contact and occupation in AD 1534-35. Interest in this topic stems from the caves’ exposure...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Monica L. Smith.

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Walled cities and rural fortifications both represent investments in place-making for warfare but are differentially conceptualized and used. Urban walls encircle noncombatants with an everyday monumentality that also serves as an economic, social, and ideological perimeter, with constructions often overdesigned relative to strategic or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laure Dussubieux. Ariane de Saxcé. Nimal Perera. Mangala Katugampola.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A little more than 25 years ago, glass furnaces were discovered at Giribawa, a site located in the northwest part of the island of Sri Lanka. Chemical analysis revealed that raw glass and glass beads were certainly manufactured at this site. Excavations have resumed at Giribawa in 2022, with a special focus on the glass...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Bauer.

This paper examines the history of medieval (circa 500-1600 CE) agricultural infrastructure—assemblages of soils, irrigation wells, and processing facilities—in the semi-arid conditions of the Raichur Doab, Southern India. Despite some investiture from ruling elites and temples, the material evidence for agro-infrastructural development suggests that it was not merely a project of state or institutional design. Rather, its development might more productively be characterized as a process of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yong Jun Kim. Nilesh Jadhav. Eun Jin Woo. Dong Hoon Shin. Vasant Shinde.

The number of Harappan cemeteries so far systematically surveyed is far less than that of contemporary settlements. Necropolis site at Rakhigarhi (India) was reported earlier but in small scale investigation. Our investigation for the last three seasons (2013 to 2016) was thus designed for improving this lacuna. We first classified each burial and analyzed statistically. The Harappan people practiced rather humble burial custom, but few were found differently and these burials look more...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mudit Trivedi.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How do high resolution chronologies change our interpretations of the archaeological record? What impact can and should they have on our analysis and our understandings of site-structure, social process and the narratives by which we account for our evidence? This paper provides one case study of considering the hazards and prospects of high resolution...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Petrie. Adam Green. Hector Orengo. Ravindra Singh.

Archaeologists cannot understand the urban process based on investigations at urban centers alone. In the Beas River Landscape and Settlement Survey, Wright contributed greatly to understanding of landscapes in South Asia’s Indus civilization (2600-1900 B.C.), revealing necessity and value of integrating settlement data into broader analyses of urbanism. Research on the Indus civilization’s settlement distributions highlights the presence of an array of archaeological sites spread across a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Green. Sneh Patel. Pam Crabtree.

In this talk, we introduce the papers of the session, which reflect the many threads of Rita P. Wright’s contributions to archaeology. Prof. Wright has established a suite of concepts and critiques that generate a comparative framework that is not restricted to a single geographical area. In her early work on ceramic production and craft, Wright synthesized the anthropology of technology with the archaeology of the Indo-Iranian borderlands, laying the foundation for a technological approach that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brad Chase. David Meiggs. P. Ajithprasad.

Pastoralism, the production and management of livestock, was integral to the lifeways practiced by the peoples of the Indus Civilization (2600-1900 BC), South Asia’s first experiment with urban society. The integration of Gujarat (India) into the interregional flows of people, goods, and ideas that knit together the Indus Civilization, for example, is associated with the widespread adoption of pastoralism in a region that was formerly characterized by small-scale horticulturalist-hunting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Bates. Adam Green. Cameron Petrie. Ravindra Nath Singh. Francesc Conesa.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate crises are raising questions about how we feed everyone in our highly urbanized modern society. Anthropological research has demonstrated that economic, political, and environmental landscapes are intricately interwoven and intersect with the diverse choices of people across all scales of society. Nowhere is this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Supriya Varma.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two categories of archaeological sites have been identified in the third and second millennia CE Saurashtra, viz. Indus and Local Chalcolithic, a distinction based on architecture, artifacts, nature, and the location of settlements. So far, the constructed narrative has been framed in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduard Fanthome.

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tracing the movement of people archaeologically is a challenge, especially since the deconstruction of the direct association between people groups and material culture. This paper approaches material culture and spatial practice as the constitution and negotiation of social relations. I...