South Asia (Other Keyword)
1-8 (8 Records)
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
Six Thousand Years of South Asia: Implications for Climate Modeling. (2017)
We review the archaeological evidence for land use patterning in South Asia over the past 6,000 years as part of a larger effort of the PAGES-supported Landcover6k and LandUse6k project to reconstruct global land use and land cover data sets for the purpose of improving models of anthropogenic land cover change used by climate scientists. Here, we use archaeological and paleoecological data from our study areas to trace land use shifts from the Southern Neolithic through the Middle or...