Moving in New Ways, Making New Places: Novelty and the Politics of Place Making

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.

Tracing the movement of people archaeologically is a challenge, especially since the deconstruction of the direct association between people groups and material culture. This paper approaches material culture and spatial practice as the constitution and negotiation of social relations. I argue that understanding “novel” material culture requires an examination of the context in which it is introduced and the modalities of constituting and negotiating social relations it affords. I examine one potentially novel spatial and material practice in a settlement in the Raichur Doab, a frontier space in medieval South India contested by three medieval imperial polities during the period I examine. This novel practice is instantiated in the construction, design, and morphology of an entranceway into a settlement I am studying. Several features of this entranceway indicate processes that historians of medieval South India have interpreted as evidence of the expansion of and integration within imperial polities. Instead, I argue that the entranceway and the spatial logic it instantiates are best understood through the social relations that coalesce around and were negotiated through it. Rather than reducing novel practices to imperial investments, this paper highlights the agency and dynamism of local groups in spatial production.

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)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36509.0