Small-Scale Complexities: Tekkalakota and the Archaeology of the Southern Deccan

Summary

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

This paper introduces the MAST project, a multi-year excavation program in South India that is designed to explore the role of small-scale societies in the development of larger interregional social formations. In particular this project will focus on areas of Iron Age and Early Historic occupation and production at the site Tekkalakota, and on the diachronic articulation of associated ritual places and political monuments which includes Neolithic ashmounds, megalithic features, and early inscriptions associated with the North Indian Mauryan Empire. In doing so, this project will reflect on long-term patterns of monumental construction and local innovation, challenging existing assumptions about the development of social complexity that looks almost exclusively to large-scale urban societies that are politically organized as formal states.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25790