Asia: South Asia (Geographic Keyword)
26-43 (43 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological research in the high elevation regions of Upper Mustang, Nepal, offer insights into population history in this region through multiple data sources including material culture, genomic, isotopic, and bioarchaeological data. Together, these data have enabled us to address questions of migration, patterns of exchange,...
Negotiating the Centrality of Regional Identity in Real Time: Punjabi, Bengali, and NWFP-Ness among Partition Refugees in Delhi (2023)
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. Archaeologists understand the limitations of viewing cultural categories as deterministic of material use and preference. Nonetheless, it is challenging to avoid such assumptions when trying to understand material patterns associated with moments of migration. This paper considers how...
The Politics of Soils on the Medieval Deccan, Southern India (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the politics of soils on the Medieval Deccan. Drawing on inscriptional stelae that record land donations and distinctions, multi-spectral remote sensing datasets, micromorphological analyses, and archaeological survey results, it evaluates how the classification, distribution, and...
Prehistoric Pointillism: Rock Art near ‘Amlah, Oman (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Technique and Interpretation in the Archaeology of Rock Art" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Rock art is one of the most ubiquitous archaeological features in southeastern Arabia, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood aspects of the region’s prehistory. Re-occurring motifs of people, weapons, camels, horses, and other animal figures appear in similar forms across the UAE and Oman, and many were produced...
Pushing Boundaries in the Scientific Investigation of Glass: A New Project to Source Ancient Indian Glass (2018)
Scientific investigation of archaeological glass has advanced, beginning in the early 2000’s, with studies relying more heavily on determination of trace element concentrations to differentiate production recipes depending on distinct ingredient sources and the use of larger corpuses of artifacts to more easily and reliably reveal production patterns. At the same time, isotope analyses (e.g., Pb, Sr and Nd) attempting to source raw materials used to manufacture glass in antiquity grew in...
A Re-examination of the Animal Bone Remains from Rojdi, a Sorath Harappan Site in Northwest India (2018)
The later 3rd and early 2nd millennium site of Rojdi in Gujarat, India was excavated under the direction of the Professor Gregory Possehl d over eight field seasons between 1982 and 1995. Rojdi is an agricultural village with substantial stone architecture, most of which dates to the early second millennium (1900-1700 BCE). Significant progress has been made in our understanding of the Sorath Harappan culture, including detailed ceramic studies, analyses of archaeobotanical materials, and...
Reconstructing Glass Manufacturing Patterns in India through Raw Materials Sourcing and Ethnoarchaeological Investigations (2023)
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. Despite the widespread distribution of Indian-made glass beads around the Indian Ocean and beyond, not much is known about South Asia’s early glass industries from the first centuries BCE through the second millennium CE. This paper will present an overview of an ongoing project designed to use elemental and isotopic...
Refugees as a Productive Force, National Belonging as Mutable: The Case of 1947 Partition Refugee Resettlement in Delhi, India (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many archaeologists have focused on the material ramifications of nationalist exclusion. Such works have documented how discriminatory policies impact the ability of immigrants and refugees to build new lives post-migration, and in some cases, even endanger their lives. In this paper, I explore the opposite question: what happens...
The Search to Resurrect Muslin Cotton in Bangladesh (2018)
Bengal cotton muslin, a particularly fine type of woven cotton fabric, had legendary status where it was traditionally produced in East Bengal—now Bangladesh—for at least 2000 years. During the colonial influence of the British Empire, muslin was widely traded outside of South Asia, and became a valuable global commodity with major impacts on both local producers and foreign markets. Political turmoil and market forces, especially pressure from the East Indian Company, completely halted muslin...
Settlement Patterns in the Taojiahu-Xiaocheng Region of Jianghan Plain China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Thoughts on Current Research in East Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The especially early emergence of Neolithic walled towns in the Jianghan Plain is widely used as an indicator of social complexity. Several models have been suggested to explain the emergence of walled towns: inter-regional conflicts between the Central Plain and the Jianghan Plain, intra-regional conflicts among walled towns in...
Small-Scale Complexities: Tekkalakota and the Archaeology of the Southern Deccan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper introduces the MAST project, a multi-year excavation program in South India that is designed to explore the role of small-scale societies in the development of larger interregional social formations. In particular this project will focus on areas of Iron Age and Early Historic occupation and production at the site Tekkalakota, and on the diachronic...
Taking Things Apart: Reconfiguring Production Practices in South India (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper I explore how taking apart the bundle of practices grouped together as ‘metallurgy’ might lead to a better understanding of not only that technology but also of ancient South Indian society. While cross-craft approaches to technologies allow archaeologists to explore potential relationships between production activities...
Timely Attributes: Rethinking Medieval Ceramics from South India (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper offers a preliminary attribute analysis of archaeological ceramics excavated at Maski (northern Karnataka) to enable an understanding of the routine and embodied practices that were productive of temporal scale in medieval (ca. AD 500-1600) south India. Ceramics have often fallen through the cracks of a disciplinary division of labour between...
Unexpected Expertise: Archaeological Science and the Creative Skills of Indus Craftspeople (2018)
Wright’s doctoral and subsequent work brilliantly employed archaeological science to show how relatively simple technological tools (single-chamber kilns) were used by skilled craftspeople in clever ways to create surprisingly technologically complex objects (black-on-grey pottery, resulting from several different cycles of atmospheric conditions during firing), objects which also provided information about patterns of social boundaries and technological style. In homage to this work, we will...
What’s in the Menu? Harappan Culinary Practices during the Urban Phase of the Indus Age (2019)
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. The study of ancient food residues does not only provide information on the ancient diet but also sheds light on the nature of food selection, processing, storage and finally the discard of food wastes. The presence of large quantities of animal bones, primarily from cattle/buffalo and sheep/goat in all Harappan...
Wild Animals in Cities: A View from South Asia’s Early Historic Period Using a Zooarchaeological and Textual Approach (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban settings are often imagined as fully domesticated landscapes, but in fact cities are complex ecosystems where many kinds of animals, including non-domesticates, play important roles. Textual evidence from the Early Historic period of South Asia gives us a...
Women’s Labor and Scholarship Production in Archaeology: Celebrating the Mentorship of Rita P. Wright (2018)
Rita Wright’s transformative work on gender and women’s labor in West, Central, and South Asia provided an important framework for the archaeological study of craft production and the organization of labor. This interrogation of gendered practice was complemented by a parallel investigation of equity in academic archaeology, particularly through the work of the SAA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Archaeology. In addition to her research and professional service, another significant...
ZooMSing to Harappan Animal Husbandry: Taxonomic Identification Using Peptide Mass Fingerprinting of Indus Valley Civilization Faunal Remains (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Indus Valley Civilization at its peak extended over 1 million km2 and encompassed an estimated five million people, with over 1,000 sites identified. Although faunal remains have been recovered from the excavations of approximately 100 archaeological sites, very few have been analyzed using biomolecular methods. This is largely because many of the...