Iron and Glass: Reconstructing (Overlapping) Technologies in Early South India

Summary

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 production debris highlights the challenges in correlating technical processes with the recovered artifacts. Technologies such as iron production and glass-working engage with similar high-heat techniques and therefore result in overlapping material assemblages, both in the production apparatus and in the waste produced. Being able to distinguish between potentially closely related production practices is fundamental to delineating the crafting communities that populated the landscape of early South India, and therefore to understanding the relationships that may have existed between them.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage