Studying maps: Buchanan in colonial south India

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Historical Archaeology in South Asia" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

This paper examines the importance of historical and cartographic information contained in documents from the colonial period (18th to 20th centuries) in framing archaeological research in south Asia. Specifically, the focus is on the published account of an information gathering journey on behalf of the East India Company conducted in 1800-01 by Francis Buchanan Hamilton, botanist and Company man. Unlike archaeologists studying the historic period in other parts of the world who routinely integrate historic texts and archaeological analysis to produce fascinating insights, the discipline of historical archaeology (i.e. the archaeology of the modern period, post 15th century) is almost non-existent in south Asia. This paper argues that historical materials can be pressed into archaeological service and can thus bridge a persistent epistemological gap exists between archaeologists and historians in South Asia, where the former restrict their attention to material culture and the latter to textual evidence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Historical Archaeology in South Asia   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology