The Archaeology of Early Medieval and Medieval South Asia: Contesting Narratives from the Eastern Ganga-Brahmaputra Basin

Description

This book looks at the ways in which archaeological methods have been used in debates concerning the early medieval and medieval periods in South Asia. Despite the incorporation and use of archaeological data to corroborate historical narratives, the theories and methods of archaeology are largely ignored in and excluded from the dominating, institutionalized, and hegemonic disciplinary discourses. The volume offers contesting insights, polemical narratives, and new data from archaeological contexts to initiate a debate on many foundational premises of archaeological and historical narratives. It focuses on the much-neglected region of the Eastern Ganga-Brahmaputra Basin as a spatial frame to do this and studies themes such as spatial and temporal scales of concepts and methods, multi-scaler factors and processes of continuity and changes, the settlement archaeology of the alluvial landscape, changing patterns of agrarian transformation, and material cultures, including coins, inscriptions, pottery, and sculptures, in their contexts in sub-regional, regional, and supra-regional intersections. Dedicated to historian Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, this volume presents a crucial and unprecedented intervention in the study of the early medieval and the medieval periods. It will be useful for scholars and researchers of archaeology, ancient history, medieval history, water history, earth sciences, palaeoecology, historical ecology, epigraphy, art history, material culture studies, Indian history, and South Asian studies in general Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of figures List of tables List of contributors Notes on transliteration A Dedicatory Note: The unsettling interrogative sensibilities of Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya and transgression of the disciplinary boundaries Chapter 1 Introduction: Trouble of thinking about the archaeology of the early medieval and the medieval in Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna Basin Part 1 Conceptual, methodological, and spatiotemporal domains of archaeology Chapter 2 Locating the medieval in South Asian archaeology: Resetting field methods and practices Chapter 3 The changing landscape of early medieval Indian history: Perspectives from archaeology Chapter 4 Engaging with the past beyond the comfort zone: Early medieval and medieval in the archaeological context of the north-western part of Bengal Part 2 Settlements, landscapes, and interpretive frameworks Chapter 5 Changing patterns of agrarian development in early medieval North Bengal: A delineation from the inscriptions Chapter 6 Early medieval and medieval settlements on the littoral and active part of a delta: An archaeological study of the southwestern part of Bangladesh Chapter 7 Chronicles of perpetually reconfiguring entanglements: A precursory understanding of the landscape archaeology of Teesta Megafan of Bangladesh Part 3 Pottery analyses and the spatiotemporal indexes Chapter 8 Pottery of Bengal during the early medieval period Chapter 9 Analysing the pottery from the Brahmaputra Valley: Issues within archaeology and history (seventh to fifteenth centuries CE) Part 4 Material culture and monumental remains in context Chapter 10 Religious pictures from Bengal and Eastern Bihar: More than illustrating pantheons Chapter 11 Temple-building in early medieval–medieval Bengal: Revisiting contexts in Western Bengal Chapter 12 The regional monetary identity of ‘medieval Bengal’ (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries CE): Coin hoards, mint towns, and connectivity Index