Historical Archaeology in South Asia

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia," at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This symposium brings together a range of scholars to discuss theoretical and methodological approaches for formulating a South Asian Historical Archaeology. Historical Archaeology in South Asia has been limited by preoccupations with postcolonial nation building and the search for cultural origins and symbolic heritage. As Lahiri (2012) and Guha (2015) have discussed, many of the projects that do focus on historic time periods continue to utilize essentialist categorizations drawn from positivist, colonial approaches to the study of the past. Moving beyond a critique of colonial and nationalist archeologies, we seek to define a new praxis of Historical Archaeology in South Asia modeled on the anti-essentialist approach and emancipatory goals of the subaltern studies movement. Themes in this direction include but are not limited to cultural and religious hybridity, colonial resistance, postcolonial socialism, the impacts of neoliberalization, and the global South Asian diaspora.

Other Keywords
Historical Archaeology • Labor • Built Landscapes • Ceramics • Cartography • Ruins • landscapes • Landscape • sacred • Contemporary Archaeology

Geographic Keywords
South Asia • INDIA • Asia (Continent) • Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lan (Country) • Republic of India (Country) • People's Republic of Bangladesh (Country) • Kingdom of Bhutan (Country) • Kingdom of Nepal (Country) • India/South Asia

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-9 of 9)

  • Documents (9)
Documents
  • Excavating Experience: Exploring Delhi’s mid-century housing through literature and streetscape survey (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sumedha Chakravarthy.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. People engage with material landscapes in embodied, emotive ways. Experience is shaped not only by physical realities, but also by social positionality and individual perspective. Archaeologists often use oral history, ethnoarchaeology, or phenomenology as a means of considering human engagement with material landscapes. Literature also...

  • Haunting and the Politics of South Asian Archaeology: Stories of three Jinn-haunted ruins (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anand V Taneja.

    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...

  • Historical Archaeology In India: Issues And Changing Perspectives (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Selvakumar Veerasamy.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Understanding India and its culture was a colonial enterprise that was initiated in 18th and 19th centuries. The notions concerning identities which were constructed during the colonial times have considerably influenced the interpretations of archaeological remains in several contexts, including the recently introduced DNA studies that...

  • The labor of making: Crafting ceramics in Medieval South India (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mannat Johal.

    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...

  • Landscapes of the Early Chalukyas (ca. 500-ca. 750 CE): a historical archaeology (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Hemanth Kadambi.

    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 India, the term Historical Archaeology usually means archaeology that privileges written evidence for documenting the past. Unlike in the Americas and Northern Europe where archaeology as a ‘discipline of things’ and ‘land(water)scapes’ has advanced an understanding of all periods, in India, this is not the case yet. Hence, periods of...

  • Particularal Histories of Diaspora: Historical Archaeology on the Cormandal Coast (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Hauser. Selvakumar Veerasamy.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Trinidad, Gudeloupe; Suriname, and Jamaica; Maurituius, Reunion, Singapore and the Cape, Fiji, Singapore, malyasia and the Phillipines. All of these are places that share one apparent factor. South Asians, of multiple denominations, genders and castes circulated in the Indian, pacific, and Atlantic oceans as enslaved and indentured...

  • Partition Refugee Housing As Emergent Heritage (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin P Riggs.

    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...

  • Problematizing The Normalized, Unsettling The Institutionalized: Thinking About The Reciprocity of Archaeology and History in Bengal (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Swadhin Sen.

    This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. The disciplinary traditions of the practice of archaeology and history, formed in colonial Bengal, have developed specific normalcies. Despite the initial divergent trajectories and institutions, both disciplines have inherited and essentialized an entangled relationship, especially about the periods which are categorized as ‘historical’....

  • Studying maps: Buchanan in colonial south India (2021)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Uthara Suvrathan.

    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 examines the importance of historical and cartographic information contained in documents from the colonial period (18th to 20th centuries) in framing archaeological research in south Asia. Specifically, the focus is on the published account of an information gathering journey on behalf of the East India Company conducted in...