Future Trajectories of South Asian Archaeology: Workshops at Yale

The Department of Anthropology at Yale University hosted the 2nd Yale South Asian Archaeology Workshop on the 28th of February 2009. This workshop series is intended to bring together some of the most exciting new work on South Asian archaeology within American academia (and, in a few cases, from outside it) by providing an intensive collaborative environment for both senior and junior scholars to present and discuss current research projects and questions. One of the aims of the series is to encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue between archaeology, the social sciences and the humanities, and to promote productive exchange with archaeological perspectives on long-term change, interregional interaction, comparative study and materiality in historical studies of South Asia.

Participants at the most recent workshop included Brad Chase, from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who presented a paper entitled �Archaeology in the Gujarati Frontier of the Indus Civilization�; Adam Green, from New York University, who presented his work on �Representation and Production: Heterarchy in the Indus Civilization�; Randall Law, also from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, whose paper, �Dholvira�s rock and mineral artifact assemblage: New insights from compositional studies and geologic provenience analysis�, focused on the Indus Civilization; Ashish Chadha, of Yale University, whose presentation was entitled �Conjuring River, Imagining Civilization: From Indus to the Vedic-Harappans�; Teresa Raczek, from University of New Hampshire and Namita Sugandhi, from the City University of New York, who made a joint presentation on the �Chatrikhera Research Project: Archaeological Research and Collaboration in Southeastern Rajasthan�; Richa Jhaldiyal, from Deccan College, India, whose paper examined �Archaeology in the Nizam�s Dominions, Hyderabad State�; and Praveena Gullapalli whose paper focused on examining �The archaeology of the early colonial/Portuguese presence in India�.

The 1st Yale South Asian Archaeology Workshop, entitled �Current Directions in South Asia Archaeology� was held in April 2008. Some of the participants at the first workshop included Ashish Chadha, from Yale University, whose presentation was entitled The Cryptographic Imagination; Parth Chauhan, from Indiana University, whose paper, The South Asian Paleolithic: Current Status and Future Directions, outlined the salient features of the South Asian Paleolithic, including recent research results and future goals; Savitha Gokulraman, from CUNY, who, in a paper entitled Revisiting the Study of Megalithic Monuments: Through an Ethnographic Study of the Surviving Tribes of the Nilgiri Region of Tamilnadu, examined how tribes in the Nilgiri region use the megalithic landscape in their daily lives by focusing on burial rituals carried out both at burial grounds and at dwelling sites; Gregory Possehl, from the University of Pennsylvania, whose presentation entitled Magan and Meluhha, explored the relationships between ancient Omana and India during the 3rd millennium B.C.; Teresa Raczek, from the University of New Hampshire, who presented her work �Excavating Typologies: Investigating Variation in South Asian Lithic Core Categories�; Namita Sugandhi, from CUNY; Marta Ameri whose �Defining the Local: the Glyptic of Gilund and the Ahar-Banas� attempted to define the local glyptic iconography of Gilund and the Ahar-Banas cultural complex by comparing the seals and impressions to other elements of local artistic production; Adam Green, from New York University, whose paper, Style and Production at Chanhu-daro: A Preliminary Examination of Seal Production in the Indus Civilization, presented an archaeological replication project aimed at seals from the Chanhu-daro assemblage and a preliminary analysis of the cha�ne oper�toires used by Indus artisans at that site; Patricia Hamrick, who used an analysis of personal ornaments, particularly bangles, to reconstruct information about social identities such as gender, religion and status in the Indus Civilization, in her paper entitled �Ornaments and Values: Bangles in the Indus �; Robert Brubaker, whose �Tearing down barriers: Meditations on the form, context and function of Vijaynagara walls� used a comparative analysis of predominant wall types in terms of form and context to suggest that Vijayanagara walls often served multiple concurrent functions in a manner that defies any easy characterization in terms of the uni-dimensional, mutually exclusive conceptual categories often implicit in archaeological considerations of function; and Julie Hanlon who, in a paper entitled �The Social Life of Figurines in the Ahar Culture�, examined the social life of cattle figurines, placing them within the overall context of the Ahar archaeological assemblages, to suggest that cows may have served as symbols of value and played a central role in the organization of Ahar culture.

The South Asian Archaeology workshops were made possible by support from the Department of Anthropology, the South Asian Studies Council, and the Council on Archaeological Studies.