The Hazards of High Resolution? Social Change, Site Structure and New Chronometric Concerns from Indor, North India

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How do high resolution chronologies change our interpretations of the archaeological record? What impact can and should they have on our analysis and our understandings of site-structure, social process and the narratives by which we account for our evidence? This paper provides one case study of considering the hazards and prospects of high resolution Bayesian chronometric models which poses new questions to site formation studies, household archaeology and the archaeology of religion. This paper draws upon the results of an extended project directed at an archaeological investigation of religious conversion to Islam in South Asia in the second millennium CE. The project combined extensive regional survey, excavations and architectural documentation focused upon the site and valley of Indor, located in the region of Mewat on the borders of Rajasthan, North India. A suite of 36 AMS radiocarbon determinations (conducted at the IUAC, Delhi) has allowed for a regional chronology which allows across different datasets for decadal, generational (25 years) and wider levels of control. The paper contributes to the following areas of emergent interest in Bayesian chronometry: the interpretation of structural life-spans, the consideration of age-depths models and defining the relationship between stratigraphic and dated events.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25445