India (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
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...
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...
Partition Refugee Housing As Emergent Heritage (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. Readings of material heritage are always entangled with understandings of who rightfully belongs. In India, colonial archaeology was used to legitimize subjugation in the past while nationalist archaeology today is used to justify the marginalization of minorities. The narratives surrounding modern day material patterns, while rarely the...
A plethora of possibilities: Evaluating debitage from large habitation mounds (2015)
For the past few decades, the analysis of lithic production has incorporated an extensive consideration of debitage. While this work has been fruitful, the social and economic context of early habitation mounds presents a number of challenges to debitage analysis. Debitage can result from a number of activities beyond chipped tool production; as a result, researchers must carefully analyze broader economic and social activities in order to offset these challenges. This paper will present the...
Portuguese settlement in Mumbai region, India: territorial occupation throughout structural remains (16th-18th centuries) (2013)
Most parts of Greater Mumbai belonged to Portugal between 1534 and 1739, except for the island of Bombay, handed over to the British in 1665. The territory of Bassein, the ancient capital of this region, was the first settlement of Estado da Índia to occupy a significant area. The Portuguese enjoyed territorial stability during its first century in Bassein. This favoured the Portuguese annexation of land through the incorporation of pre-existing structures, the application of solutions used in...
Remembering the Raj: Kolkata India's South Park Street Cemetery, Creating and Commemorating Anglo-Indian Society (2016)
This paper examines the commemorative iconography of Kolkata India's South Park Street Cemetery. Established in 1767, the South Park Street Cemetery is the resting place of the leadership of England's colonial efforts in Bengal. It contains over 1600 monuments and likely many more burials. These monuments range from enormous masonry pyramids to scaled down Greek and Roman temples, and Hindu and Mughal inspired tombs. Drawing upon an international commemorative vocabulary combining classical...
Un-entangling Pulse Domestication in South Asia (2015)
India possesses a unique Neolithic transition to sedentism and agriculture which has shaped the cultural and ecological trajectory of the subcontinent. In the early Holocene South Asia was a subcontinent of hunter-gatherers. By 2000 years ago it was mostly inhabited by farmers, supporting densely populated river valleys, coastal plains, urban populations, states and empires. South Asia appears to have been host to a mosaic of processes, including local domestication of plants and animals, the...
Usable Aid: Refugee Resettlement in Post-Partition Delhi (2020)
This is a paper/report submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Previous archaeologies of socialism and the welfare state demonstrate how spaces designed by centralized authorities are often incongruent with the needs of individuals. This paper considers 1947 Partition refugee resettlement in Delhi as a contrasting example, one that exemplifies the potential effectiveness of government investment in public housing. Delhi’s colonies are unique...