Connections and Complexity

New Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia

Shinu Anna Abraham, Praveena Gullapalli, Teresa P Raczek, Uzma Z Rizvi, Shinu Anna Abraham, Praveena Gullapalli, Teresa P Raczek, Uzma Z Rizvi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781598746860
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315431833
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This compilation of original research articles highlight the important cross-regional, cross-chronological, and comparative approaches to political and economic landscapes in ancient South Asia and its neighbors. Focusing on the Indus Valley period and Iron Age India, this volume incorporates new research in South Asia within the broader universe of archaeological scholarship. Contributions focus on four major themes: reinterpreting material culture; identifying domains and regional boundaries; articulating complexity; and modeling interregional interaction. These studies develop theoretical models that may be applicable researchers studying cultural complexity elsewhere in the world.

Chapter 1
Connections and Complexity: New Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia

Shinu Anna Abraham, Praveena Gullapalli, Teresa P. Raczek, and Uzma Z. Rizvi

As a compilation of contemporary research in South Asia, this volume takes an important cross-regional, cross-chronological, and comparative approach to political and economic landscapes in ancient South Asia and its connections to Central and Southwest Asia. Since the late 1990s, the discipline has been slowly undergoing a transformation; this current scholarship is based on a variety of new research projects as well as the exploration of existing data using fresh theoretical perspectives and the application of contemporary methodologies. However, at the moment, these trends are mainly reflected in scattered journal articles and conference presentations. The contributions in this volume bring together these varied yet connected aspects of research and thus move the field forward. Readers will recognize familiar archaeological themes dealing with social and political complexity, trade and exchange, interregional interaction, and a focus on material culture. These issues continue to be discussed and debated within the regional scholarship of South Asia–and in this iteration, provide additional theoretical models that may be applicable elsewhere in the world.

One of the challenges in organizing the papers in this volume was the great archaeological diversity that they include. It is impossible to create an encompassing culturally historical framework because the various regions of the subcontinent exhibit distinct and heterogeneous traditions. Rather than focus on delineating a culturally historical framework for all of South Asia, this volume identifies four major themes that crosscut current archaeological approaches to the subcontinent, such as reinterpreting material culture, identifying domains and regional boundaries, articulating complexity, and modeling interregional interaction. These themes overlap extensively; few of the chapters that follow fit neatly into only one, or even two, of the four lines of inquiry listed above. Therefore, rather than attempting to force a monolithic structure onto this introductory discussion of the chapters, we have chosen to address each of the four topics in turn. Within the topical sections we include discussions of relevant chapters, and readers will note that most chapters are referenced in multiple sections. This approach is deliberate, and not only because it highlights the integrative, comparative, and anthropological perspective of most of the authors. It serves to underscore the myriad intellectual threads that bind the chapters in this volume together, the researchers themselves, and indeed the world of ancient South Asia and its neighbors.

Reinterpreting Material Culture

One of the exciting developments in South Asian archaeology that is emphasized in this volume is the ongoing reinterpretation of material culture. The study of material culture in South Asian archaeology—as in all archaeology—has had a long and deep history. While early approaches emphasized the creation of typologies as a way to establish regional culture histories, contemporary studies investigate a broad range of artifacts and features—from beads (Kenoyer 1997; Kenoyer et al. 1991; Roux et al. 1995), to figurines (e.g. Clark 2003; Jarrige 1984), to burials (Brubaker 2001; Moorti 1994), and more—in order to elucidate an equally wide range of information about past societies. Current investigations of material culture are embedded within social relationships and are concerned with production and practice.

Studies of production practices have drawn on ethnoarchaeological and ethnographic research to understand possible parameters and concerns that might have shaped ancient craft practitioners (Kenoyer et al. 1994; Kramer 1997; Lahiri 1995; Possehl 1981; Srinivasan 1994; Tripathi and Mishra 1997; Tripathi and Tripathi 1994). Others have utilized technical analyses (Gogte 1982, 1997; Halim and Vidale 1984; Miller 1994) and archaeological remains (Miller 2007; Paddayya et al. 2000) to better delineate and contextualize the processes by which various artifacts might have been produced. That these production practices are socially and culturally situated is clear (Miller 2007; Ratnagar 2007; Wright 1985); therefore, while it is impossible to understand the production of material culture without understanding its social and cultural contexts, it is possible to utilize the nature of (and variation in) production practices as yet another way into ancient social and cultural realms. Taken together, two of the general approaches to material culture—analyses of the end product as well as of its production—allow archaeologists to explore more fully the nature of ancient societies.

The classes of material culture represented in this volume include cooking residues, seals, weights, lithics, metal implements, beads, monumental towers, and even invisible artifacts like cloth, from geographic areas spanning peninsular India to Oman, with the Harappan¹ world being well-represented. Also represented are a variety of approaches to material culture that span the two general ways introduced above—the authors fruitfully analyze stylistic characteristics of groups of artifacts, their distribution, and the production practices that created them. These reinterpretations, or revisitations, have their impetus in new applications of technologies, new theories, and new data; but regardless of the motivation, each case has moved our understanding of ancient South Asia forward. In doing so, these scholars also illustrate how useful it can be to address extant data in new ways while highlighting the various ways in which material culture can be used to reconstruct aspects of past societies.

At a fundamental level, the (re)classification of artifacts can have a significant impact on interpretations. For example, are these "walled enclosures" or "towers?" Is that really a one-horned animal? In their reassessment of Bronze Age towers in Oman, Charlotte Cable and Christopher Thornton (Chapter 20) deconstruct how glossing the Umm an-Nar features as towers has masked variability in construction and location, and they argue that understanding them as monumental architecture—and all that implies—might be more fruitful. They argue that a consideration of the variations and patterning among the Umm an-Nar monumental features is necessary if we are to begin to explore issues of sociopolitical organization in the region. They note that the terminology attached to the towers has been an obstacle in attempts to assess their nature and function. They suggest a new typology based on form and distribution to better understand this culture that participated in the Middle Asian Interaction Sphere (MAIS).

In a similar vein but dealing with much smaller artifacts, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer's (Chapter 6) reassessment of "unicorn" seal iconography has implications not only for our understanding of Harappan iconography and ideology, but for the development of unicorn figures more generally. After laying out the arguments regarding whether or not the animals depicted in the seals are one-horned animals or two-horned animals in profile, he begins a reassessment of seal iconography. Using a close analysis of iconographic traditions, including the evidence of figurines, he presents a strong case that the familiar one-horned animals are indeed unicorns.

Looking to the physical characteristics of material remains can elicit information useful in reconstructing past practices, which in turn provides insight into aspects of culture and society. Few practices are as intimately embedded in culture as cooking and eating. Arunima Kashyap and Steve Weber (Chapter 10) illustrate how investigating the previously overlooked traces of food preparation can expand our avenues for investigating the past, which is especially exciting in an area that has been as well-studied as the Harappan world. They continue investigations of everyday activities on experimental starch residues, focusing here on the reconstruction of cooking practices whose residues have been uncovered in ceramics from Farmana, Haryana. They do this by first identifying the starch grains in the residues and then conducting a series of experiments using contemporary South Asian cooking techniques as analogies. By examining the effect of various cooking methods on starch residues, they are able to make preliminary determinations about which cooking techniques might be observable in the archaeological record.

Arguably, at the other end of the spectrum of cultural practices are those technologies that on the surface seem impervious to the idiosyncrasies of cultural influence, such as lithic and metal production. In their chapters, Praveena Gullapalli (Chapter 14), Teresa Raczek (Chapter 18), and Uzma Rizvi (Chapter 17) explore how attention to the details of production encoded in material remains can yield provocative insights into the social and cultural worlds inhabited by the producers—an approach that has heretofore been underutilized in South Asian archaeology when discussing stone and metal technologies. Gullapalli aims to use metallurgical data from South Indian, Megalithic, Iron Age sites to begin situating production practices within their social contexts. Predicating her discussion on the argument that all technological choices are socially and culturally informed, Gullapalli reexamines metallographic analyses to identify possible patterns in the methods of production utilized by ancient metal workers. She notes that there seems to have been differential use of production techniques and argues that such patterns could indicate socially defined traditions of manufacture. Raczek investigates nonspecialist-produced crafts and the technology used to produce them. Arguing that the investigation of household-produced crafts provides an opening for looking into practices that crosscut multiple communities, she demonstrates that household-level lithic production in the Mewar Plain consisted of embodied skill, knowledge, and performative crafting. Through these actions and bodily habits, regional inhabitants demonstrated their participation in communities of skill that stretched beyond site boundaries. As a result, the study demonstrates that the analysis of mundane items, such as lithics, can open a window to understanding intraregional relations.

The question of organization and planning is at the center of the chapter by Rizvi (Chapter 17). She utilizes an archaeological survey of the Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex, dated to the 3rd millennium BC, to provide a case study in which the decisions of communities to continually practice copper production articulate settlement patterns. They also provide glimpses of placemaking that were the result of community-based decisions related to functional and technological requirements for that craft. She connects the production of craft to community and social identity in a manner that provides a foundation for the discussion of social complexity. Such work challenges the normative notions of craft industry in smaller-scale societies as being less complex, and it provides a lens through which to think about the connections between settlement patterns and technology.

In a similar vein, Shinu Abraham (Chapter 13) examines the production of glass beads to better define the sociopolitical characteristics of Early Historic, Tamil South India. Abraham takes the massive corpus of glass beads emerging from the excavations at the Kerala port site of Pattanam and situates it within a Tamil, South Indian context. In an effort to use glass-bead data to reconstruct this early craft economy, she examines the evidence related to one subcategory of bead, the Indo-Pacific bead, which was manufactured in South India but has a geographic distribution well beyond the region. Drawing on sites in Deccan and Tamil South India, as well as Sri Lanka, she suggests that the patterns imply a decentralized and regionally dispersed production landscape, with stages of bead manufacture taking place in separate settlements. To satisfy demand in the areas around the Indian Ocean, however, such a system must also have been linked to regional organization networks, possibly itinerant merchant communities that could coordinate both dispersed production and eventual transport of finished beads to key ports like Pattanam.

The distribution of material culture with similar or identical characteristics can imply shared worldviews, political integration or trade relations; however, as several papers in this volume make clear, it makes a big difference whether archaeologists focus on similarities or differences. Previously well-recognized categories of artifacts from ancient South Asia are reexamined in order to elicit a more accurate picture of past social and cultural processes by revisiting their characterizations as homogeneous. Heather Miller (Chapter 9) and Marta Ameri (Chapter 19), looking at weights and seals respectively, identify patterns of variations in material that had seemed uniform. By doing this, they create a more nuanced understanding of regional variation and interactions and the conception of a Harappan "veneer." Miller investigates the nature of the Indus weight system, discussing its value, nature, and function and assessing the evidence for standardization. She then continues with a discussion of what weight standardization might mean for the political organization of the Indus Civilization. Ameri grapples with questions of regional interactions and variation within the homogeneity of the Mature Harappan period. She identifies stylistic and iconographic variation in the seals and sealings from geographically dispersed sites in order to delineate the relationships betwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Connections and Complexity: New Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia
• 2. To What Extent Were Prehistoric Sri Lankans Isolated from the Indian Mainland? Biotic and Archaeological Considerations
• 3. Commodities and Things: The Kulli in Context
• 4. New Evidence for Interaction between the Iranian Plateau and the Indus Valley: Seals and Sealings from Konar Sandal South
• 5. The Sindh Archaeological Project: Explorations in the Lower Indus Basin and Western Sindh
• 6. Iconography of the Indus Unicorn: Origins and Legacy
• 7. Forest Products in a Wider World: Early Historic Connections across Southern India
• 8. The Substance and Symbolism of Long-distance Exchange: Textiles as Desired Trade Goods in the Bronze Age Middle Asian Interaction Sphere
• 9. Weighty Matters: Evidence for Unity and Regional Diversity from the Indus Civilization Weights
• 10. Starch Grain Analysis and Experiments Provide Insights into Harappan Cooking Practices
• 11. Red Polished Ware in Gujarat: Surface Collections from Inland Sites
• 12. Spiraling Interconnectedness: A Fresh Look at Double-spiral-headed Pins in the Indian Subcontinent
• 13. In Search of Craft and Society: The Glass Beads of Early Historic Tamil South India
• 14. Lamination as Production Technique: Patterns and Possibilities
• 15. Bronze Age Pastoralism and Differentiated Landscapes along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor
• 16. The Ghost of the State in Deep Antiquity: A Closer Look at the Harappan Civilization from the Viewpoint of Sanskrit Literature
• 17. Crafting Communities and Producing Places: Copper, Settlement Patterns, and Social Identity in the Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex, Rajasthan, India
• 18. Technology and Everyday Crafts: Identifying Traces of Shared Histories in the Archaeological Record
• 19. Regional Diversity in the Harappan World: The Evidence of the Seals
• 20. Monumentality and the Third-millennium "Towers" of the Oman Peninsula
• 21. Small-scale Interactions across the North Gujarat Plain
• Index
• About the Authors