Migrant and Diaspora Communities in Ancient Kutch and Saurashtra

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Two categories of archaeological sites have been identified in the third and second millennia CE Saurashtra, viz. Indus and Local Chalcolithic, a distinction based on architecture, artifacts, nature, and the location of settlements. So far, the constructed narrative has been framed in binary terms, with the diaspora communities having migrated from Panjab and Sindh into Kutch and Saurashtra and establishing the Indus sites, while the local communities of Saurashtra were the residents of the Chalcolithic villages. A close reading of the architectural elements and artifacts more recently has allowed me to delineate instead a somewhat fuzzy and interdigitated world in ancient Saurashtra interlocking the migrant/diaspora and the local communities. To an extent, I question the simplistic conflation often made by archaeologists between people and their material words into bounded entities and further seek to complicate the discussion by relooking at these two types of settlements. I argue that what seemingly appear to be two separate communities with their contrasting materiality may not quite have had such neat divisions between them in terms of autonomy, mobility, multiple social identities, exchange networks, and so forth.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35806.0