Andrew M. Bauer

Toward a Political Ecology in Early South India: Preliminary Considerations of the Sociopolitics of Land and Animal Use in the Southern Deccan, Neolithic through Early Historic Periods

The archaeology of southern India has long been dominated by cultural-historical paradigms, which have more recently become reliant on environmental stimuli to explain culture change. This interpretive framework has created a relatively fixed set of relationships between the environment and past human societies that oversimplifies issues of agency and causation in largely deterministic terms. At issue here is a lack of adequate treatment for the sociopolitical complexity of human-environment relationships. In this essay we examine the relationships between emerging social differences and both stable and dynamic aspects of land use throughout the South Indian Neolithic (3000–1200 B.C.), Iron Age (1200–500 B.C.), and Early Historic (500 B.C.–A.D. 500) periods in the southern Deccan region of South India. In an effort to contextualize land use in wider sociopolitical realms, we focus on the empirical components of three aspects of the archaeological record—animal use, agricultural regimes, and monument production and maintenance—through a lens of political ecology. Accepting that land use is socially and culturally mediated, we suggest how sociopolitical distinctions emergent during these periods could be viewed in relation to the production of a landscape that differentially included wild and domesticated animals, cultivars, water reservoirs, irrigation agriculture, and monumental architecture. In this sense, we argue that the landscape itself could be seen as a social product through which sociopolitical differences were experienced and perceived, and that the historical development of the landscape is both the artifact and medium of sociopolitics in early South India. As such, the determinants of social history remain in social and cultural fields of action, though not removed from the ecological-material world of which people are a part.

How things act: An archaeology of materials in political life

This paper develops a theoretical perspective on how archaeologists might examine the actions of things—objects and materials—in long-term historical processes and political practices. In recent years, anthropological theories pertaining to materiality and new materialisms have challenged traditional philosophical perspectives on things, attributing a degree of social agency to materials, places, and objects that had been previously labeled inert or passive. We critically engage these theories and suggest that they might better account for the social acts and political roles of things by applying a holistic archaeological perspective attuned to how materials and human values converge to produce political action, particularly through their incorporation into specific historical processes that we term “entrainment.” We present recent archaeological and environmental data from South India to demonstrate how researchers might see political action less as an ontological property of a conscious goal-oriented agent or a broad assemblage of things, and more as a potentiality that emerges in politically-inflected and contingent associations of people, organisms, and things.

Remote Sensing Soils and Social Geographies of Difference: The Landscape Archaeology of Regur from Iron Age through Medieval Period Northern Karnataka, Southern India

ABSTRACT This paper combines analyses of Landsat 8 multispectral data with textual records and diachronic low-density artifact distributions to evaluate how soil differences were incorporated into cultural landscapes around the multicomponent site of Maski, southern India. Spatial analysis indicates that Iron Age (1200–300 b.c.) and Early Historic Period (300 b.c.–a.d. 500) inhabitants differentiated soil types and used more water-retentive, clay-rich soils (regur) for agriculture and sandier soils for locations of metals production. Similar distinctions between soil types are evident in Medieval Period (a.d. 500–1600) inscriptions, but artifact distributions indicate that some inhabitants used less desirable sandier soils for agriculture during the period. Taken together, the distribution, remote sensing, and inscriptional data suggest that social inequalities in access to more valued soils contributed to a socially differentiated landscape by at least the 14th century a.d. and point to the combined role of archaeology and remote sensing to complement and interrogate the historical record.