The Materiality of Domestic Space: Indor Khera, North India, 200 BCE- 500 CE

Summary

Most State and University-sponsored excavations in India have tended to focus on public and elite spaces, in keeping with nationalistic aims of projecting a grandiose view of the past. This has led to the inevitable marginalization of non-elite domestic spaces. One of the few cases of household archaeology in the Indian subcontinent has come from Indor Khera in the Upper Ganga Plains in northern India. Archaeological data recovered during the excavations has given valuable information on the intersecting histories of ordinary houses and households dated between 200 BCE and 500 CE in this peripheral neighbourhood in a small town. The current paper is an attempt to assess and map the materiality of everyday practices of a household through a micro-study of a single house, analyzing through its various episodes of construction, use, alterations, and adjustments, the patterns illustrative of an everyday life. It is possible to do a ‘close reading’ of the excavated data (micro-stratigraphies, features, and contextually recovered artefacts,) within a house, that will enable the identification of the location and nature of individual activities undertaken by ordinary people, as well as the flexible and changing uses of space over time.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeology of India

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14993