Many Communities, Many Foods: The Economic and Political Implications of Diversified Cropping Strategies before, during, and after Urbanism in Northwest India ca. 3200–1500 BC

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Climate crises are raising questions about how we feed everyone in our highly urbanized modern society. Anthropological research has demonstrated that economic, political, and environmental landscapes are intricately interwoven and intersect with the diverse choices of people across all scales of society. Nowhere is this clearer than in northwest India, where diverse cropping strategies have played a major role in the region’s political ecology. Archaeology provides the tools to explore the *longue durée of the economic and political impact of diverse agricultural strategies. In this paper, we will explore the economic and political implications of the exploitation of different agricultural systems. Over more than four millennia of social development and transformation, the use of different crops and cropping regimes facilitated different kinds of interaction at various scales, potentially at times alleviating the pressures brought about by increasing urbanization. For example, in the hinterland of Rakhigarhi, one of the region’s first cities, farmers developed a variety of strategies to survive social and environmental diversity and change. These diverse multi-cropping strategies persisted, and were facilitated by social choices that may have favored interaction among rural small-scale settlements before, during, and after phases of urbanism.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32398