Historical Archaeology in South Asia

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.