Settlement, Socio-environmental Practice and the Long Durée of Landscape Production in South India: A Regional View from Maski, Raichur District, Karnataka

Summary

For five seasons, the Maski Archaeological Research Project has been collecting new multi-period archaeological and environmental data on changing patterns in settlement, agricultural, pastoral and metallurgical land-use practices from a 64km2 study area surrounding the large multi-period site at Maski. Our research documents significant temporal changes in the size, configuration, density and location of settlements, as well as those among a myriad of other sites (e.g. pastoral camps, field stations, iron working facilities, rock art complexes, water retention features, and mortuary sites), and ‘off-site’ artifact distributions dating to between the South Indian Neolithic and Medieval Periods (3000 BCE-1600 CE). Occupational histories of geo-environmental contexts (e.g. inselberg slopes and terraces, pediment slopes, peneplain and river terraces) point to shifts in social and environmental practices that transformed a range of soils, water and mineral sources into social and economic resources. We discuss how, through the deployment of strategies and technologies of control (social and environmental), opportunities and inequalities of access to these resources were constructed and contested across an ever-changing political landscape. In doing so we argue for a regionally unique social and environmental history in which ecological vectors of social difference contributed to the production of a temporally dynamic political landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14508