Archaeological Excavations In Central India

The case study offered in this book is based upon an archaeological examination of the Early Historic town site of Kaundinyapura in central India. In the Early Historic period (third century BC to fourth century AD) the Indian subcontinent presents widespread evidence for long-distance exchange in durable goods at a time when political entities were relatively short-lived and had few resources to invest in the facilitation of exchange. Despite a lack of centrally provided economic infrastructure, the communities of the subcontinent shared a material culture that demonstrated communication about style as well as the physical movement of objects. Even small towns like Kaundinyapura were participants in these patterns of regional exchange, in which households engaged in production and distribution activities that enabled them to maintain links with the wider region through the consumption of a shared corpus of material goods.

This book offers a definitive archaeological perspective on the history of early urban growth in India. It does this by looking at both the protohistoric and the early historic periods, coming down to about AD 300 and later. Geographically, it covers all the major areas of the subcontinent. The existing archaeological data have been synthesized to yield a comprehensive picture of the morphology of ancient sites and their place within what is currently known of their settlement perspectives. This book addresses itself to some of the cardinal issues of South Asian archaeology - the origin and decline of the Indus civilization; the issue of its merger in the main flow of India's later cultural development; the archaeological basis of its long chronology; aspects of Indus urbanism; the reasons for the growth of neolithic-chalcolithic inner India; and the patterns and problems of urban growth in the early historic period on the subcontinental scale. In each case the author's concern is with understanding the situation at the grassroots level within an essentially South Asian framework. The hypotheses offered in this book should lead to some major rethinking about the story of archaeological development in the subcontinent.

The “monumental bias” of Buddhist archaeology has hampered our understanding of the socio-religious mechanisms that enabled early Buddhist monks to establish themselves in new areas. To articulate these relationships, Shaw presents here the first integrated study of settlement archaeology and Buddhist history, carried out in the area around Sanchi, a Central Indian UNESCO World Heritage site. Her comprehensive, data-rich, and heavily illustrated work provides an archaeological basis for assessing theories regarding the dialectical relationship between Buddhism and surrounding lay populations. It also sheds light on the role of the introduction of Buddhism in changing settlement patterns.This volume was originally published in 2007 by the British Association of South Asian Studies.

Critical study based on archaeological data to represent the different aspects of the socioeconomic and cultural life of the people of Madhya Pradesh.

Focuses On The Ideas And Work Of Alexander Cunningham And Examines The Contribution Of His Assistants-Beglar And Carlleyle. Examines The Defenitions Of Archaeological Research, The Conflict Between Archaeologists And Scholars And Different Approaches Towards The Conservation Of Historical Monuments. Reconstructs The History Of-Bodh Gaya, Sanchi And Bharat And Amravati. Useful For General Readers Interested In India`S Antiguity, Students And Researchers. Has 10 Chapters Followed By A Useful Bibliography And An Index.

This book reports on excavations at Paithan in India revealed the development of two early Hindu temples from the 4th century to the 9th: the key formative phase of Hinduism. The temples started as small shrines but were elaborated into formal temples. In relation to these changes, the excavations revealed a sequence of palaeobotanical and palaeofaunal evidence that give insight into the economic and social changes that took place at that time.