Format: Paper presentations with discussion
Convenors:
Dr Bishnupriya Basak, University of Calcutta, India, basak.bishnupriya@gmail.com
Elspbeth Hodgins, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, ehodgins@flinders.edu.au
Archaeological practice has increasingly moved beyond the confines of excavations and surveys which pivot on ancient vestiges of past cultures. The discipline finds itself navigating an uneasy space within which attempts to decolonise archaeological theory and method are buoyed by the pursuit of Western scientific ‘truth’. This is especially true for nations which still bear the marks of the colonial enterprise or those where Indigenous voices have been stifled for generations. Any effort to decolonise archaeology thus would need to unhinge the discipline from its overt association with past material culture and draw on its inter-relations with neighbouring disciplines, local history, and cultural memory. Recent research argues that the ‘local’ is far from an isolated, hermetically sealed box. Instead, the production and practices of the local are inflected by the mainstream and global idioms. The genre of local history therefore assumes new dynamics. It cannot be divorced either from memory-making processes entailing communities who lay claims to their histories. Archaeological sites and places embed myths and legends that are retained, contested or challenged in acts of remembering and forgetting. How is collective memory interleaved with both archaeology and local history?
This session invites presentations foregrounding multiple perspectives on a range of queries, albeit not restricted to these—how is an archaeological past formed in the present? Is a segregation of pasts—archaeological and historical—possible? What are the resources that individuals draw upon, in crafting and imagining rhetorical strategies relating to archaeological sites and material culture? Do they disrupt any grand narrative even when they remain ‘uncanonised’? Are we talking of multiple pasts situated in the present? Whose pasts? How do power trajectories unfold in these processes? It is hoped that this session will enrich our understanding of these interrelationships.
Papers:
From a Profane to a Sacred Landscape: The Archaeology of Sohpet Bneng Peak, Meghalaya
Marco Babit Mitri, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India
Sohpet Bneng hill in the Ri-Bhoi district of Meehalaya, had assumed a very significant position among the cultural landscapes of Khasi-Jaintia hill, owing to the symbolic processes associated with the Khasi community’s sense of the place in their memory and legends. Accounted through the myth of creation, the landscape where the peak stands is imbued with strong cultural and human meaning, which, over time, has attached layers of sedimented-past and created a sense of the sacred among the Khasi-Pnar community of Meghalaya. Archaeological exploration and excavation at the site of Lawnongthroh on the northern slopes of Sohpet Bneng hill reveals an array of archaeological material left behind from an ancient settlement. Through a systematic archaeological excavation on the northern part of the ridge of the hill at Lawnongthroh village, the antiquity of human occupation of the hill can be traced back to the Neolithic period.
A vantage point of reference for cultures to interact with their past, Sohpet Bneng peak survived in the people’s memory as a ‘cradle’ of their culture and still stands as a symbol of the ‘identity’ for the Khasi-Pnar community of Meghalaya. This paper is a report on the relationship between folk narrative and archaeological science based on the case study of Lawnongthroh in Meghalaya.
In the Buddha’s Trails: Landscapes of Public Memory in the Nepal Terai
A. Soheb Vahab, Dept of History, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
As with other institutionalised religious traditions, the mapping of the Buddhist geographia sacra has been an obsession with believers and scholars alike, fuelled, not least, by the continuing hopes that further excavations might throw up something dramatic. In this talk, I hope to show how key incidents from the Buddha’s biography get mapped onto the built and natural landscape of Lumbini, Tilaurakot, and its environs, which together are considered to be his natal setting before he left home for a peripatetic teaching career. The cluster of sites, which fall within the territorial boundaries of Nepal, have seen sporadic excavations since the late 19th century, even as much more remains to be explored and scientifically excavated. The landscape is so layered with myths that it has become a part of the collective psyche of the local communities, both Buddhist and otherwise, to the point that there exists a palpable discomfort with contending scholarly claims, which sometimes escalate into a cross-border tug-of-war over the identification of important sites. The archaeological relics, then, acquire afterlives of their own that are closely embedded in the beliefs and quotidian practices of local communities. What is striking in all this is the strong interest that local communities evince in their history, even as there are also occasional acknowledgments of a somewhat violent past. This paper asks how we might get the archaeological past to speak to the local voices without necessarily disenfranchising or obliterating the latter, who ultimately are the avowed custodians of their cultural heritage.
Vaisali: Local History, Sacred Landscape and Cultural Memory
Nupur Dasgupta, Dept of History, Jadavpur University, India
This paper offers the historian’s take on how local history is sought within given contexts, using archaeology as one of the essential modes of investigation. When it comes to studying the local in specific contexts, the archaeological probe spills over into the cognitive scope of ethnography in reckoning a cultural history. This problem will be explored within the select context of the cultural history of Vaisali, a small town and its neighbourhood in the District of Vaishali in the modern state of Bihar, India. The visibility of Vaisali, comprising several sites within the zone, is conspicuous in terms of archaeological elements which have been identified with reference to the literary descriptions found in the early Buddhist and Jain canons. Academic reviews of archaeologists and historians, as well as the continued tradition of veneration among adherents of the religious orders on a global scale, have shaped the idea of distinct sacred spaces, remembered and revisited through the dual histories of the religious orders, and in canonical and popularly disseminated narratives yielding a rich collective memory. We shall essentially traverse widened scopes of archaeology and history combined with ethnography in order to dive into diverse ranges of cultural experiences and move toward a nuanced local history trajectory.
Ritual Practice, Community Histories and Archaeology in South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India
Bishnupriya Basak, Dept of Archaeology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India
Recent anthropological studies uphold ritual as a site of politics. Ritual practices and festivals are moments of local sacred places gaining in significance over the years, drawing in pilgrims from other localities, and commemorating beliefs born and strengthened in the environment. The genre of local history cannot ignore these strands of community celebrations, which are mostly sourced from rich repositories of oral histories growing around the existing practices and reinforced through performative acts. An archaeological object accrues new meanings and values, many times displaced from their original context.
This ethnographic documentation of the cult of Dakshinray, worshipped annually in his shrine at Dhapdhapi, is part of fieldwork that I conducted in the Sundarbans, South 24 Pargans. Dakshinray is one of the more popularised cults in the Sundarbans, which is retained in popular perception as one associated with a tiger-infested forestscape. It had its beginnings in tales of distress faced by communities of woodcutters, beeswax and honey gatherers in their regular forays into the wilderness for livelihoods. Dakshinray here is represented as a warrior, separate from his other two iconographic forms. Circulating legends associated with these representations have congealed around the practicing cult, which makes an interesting probe in cultural memory, invoking questions on the construction of archaeological/historical past(s).
Is the ‘Neolithic’ Prehistoric?
Sukanya Sharma
An understanding of the term ‘Neolithic’ in the archaeological literature of Northeast India is the main focus of this paper. The most prominent marker of the ‘Neolithic period’ here is the ground and polished axes. Besides that, cord marked sherds are also used as a Neolithic marker wherever found. In the Digaru-Kolong River valley, when people build houses in low mounds which occur sporadically in a broad flood plain which starts from the foothills of the Shillong plateau and continues till the banks of the Brahmaputra River, they find polished stone axes and adzes. Sarutaro was reported as a ‘Neolithic’ site from the area in 1971. Seventeen AMS dates from the study area give us a time frame of the archaeological evidence, starting from 1141 BP to 585 BP In the immediate vicinity of the area there was growth of an urban way of life with evidence of the use of metal. The ‘Neolithic markers’ represent the ‘Neolithic prehistoric period’. This paper hypothetically states that these ‘neolithic markers’ are not products of the period which the radiocarbon dates indicate but they have travelled in time. The paper will discuss this process of ‘time travel’.
Connecting the Past and the Present: The Kaviyangagn Ancestral Pottery Project
Dr Chih-Hua Chiang, Ass. Prof., Dept of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
The story begins on September 13, 2015, with a unique and unconventional wedding. This wedding was initiated by an object, the ancestral post, that had been preserved in the National Taiwan University Anthropology Museum for over eighty years. The protagonists of this wedding were the National Taiwan University and the source community of the ancestral post, the Kaviyangan community of the Paiwan tribe.
Through this unique wedding, National Taiwan University and the Kaviyangan community established a new relationship. It is their hope that through the establishment of this relationship, they can transform the conundrum created by colonial history.
This marital relationship has now approached its sixth year. Both the Kaviyangan community and National Taiwan University have maintained, strengthened, and transformed this relationship through various activities. This article introduces how archaeology is used to organise and understand the ancestral pottery collected from the chief’s house of the old Kaviyangan community. It also delves into how the tribe contemplates the placement of these ancestral ‘objects’ within contemporary contexts, seeking possibilities for their organic continuity in the present. This process further stimulates our deeper research into the ‘objects’ themselves, laying the foundation for sharing more stories about the ancestors.
Recollecting Local History of Balasore Through Architectural Remains Described in Jhon Beam’s Memoir in Light of Local Cultural Memory
Dr Soumi Sengupa, Assistant Professor (Guest Faculty), History & Archaeology, NEHU, Tura Campus, Meghalaya, India
Biswajit Mohanty, Sri Sai College of Education, Ongole Village, Andhra Pradesh
Heritage refers to the historical and cultural aspects of a community, including buildings, traditions, stories, and practices that shape their identity. These heritages are not exclusive to any one time period but are characterised by enduring collective recollections. The present research attempts to re-locate the architectural remains of Balasore mentioned in the memoir of John William Beam to rebuild the regional history. These architectural remains have undergone structural and functional transformations, resulting in a diverse and elaborated history. This transformation is enormously reflected on the memories of the local communities, which are been documented and discussed to understand the monumentality of the regional identities infused with local culture and memory.
Investigating Indigenous Representation at Museums in Canada’s Newest Province
Jared T. Hogan, Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
The idea that there are no Indigenous Peoples in Newfoundland and Labrador is a widely held belief for some non-Indigenous residents in the province and beyond. Such thinking is attributed to Indigenous Peoples being omitted in the Terms of Union between Canada and Newfoundland when Newfoundland became Canada’s newest province in 1949. Museums, provincial politics, and education curricula are central ways this myth has been spread and maintained. As such, museums in Newfoundland and Labrador are slowly beginning to face their contentious relationships with Indigenous Peoples and their representation of Indigenous Peoples. This presentation provides an update on the first qualitative analysis of museums for Indigenous representation in the province, assessing the current visibility of Indigenous cultures in non-Indigenous-led virtual and physical heritage institutions and comparing them to Indigenous-led museums. Using digital media analysis, exhibit analysis, and semi-structured interviews with museum professionals, preliminary results show that museum exhibits in the province are outdated and need updating. While there is a desire by museum professionals to decolonize their exhibits, it is evident across the province that limited funding, lack of accessible education in Indigenous Studies, and clear paths for working with, for, and by Indigenous communities impact Indigenous representation in museums.