Artefacts of History

Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-93-5388-081-1
Verlag: SAGE Publications

Buch, Englisch, 308 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 390 g

This book encourages us to critically regard the ways in which ideologies of cultural heritage and civilisational legacies are transformed into tangible and visible things through archaeological scholarship.

Through little-known histories of the practices, governance and scholarship of the archaeology of India, this book re-examines the manner in which the past is recalled and historicized. It guides us to think afresh of the histories of antiquarianism in South Asia, explore the impetus of collecting and curatorial practices within the scholarship of pre-colonial India, and investigate the diverse linkages within the histories of Indian archaeology. It encourages a focus upon issues of historiography, methodology and notions of evidence and looks in to the responsibilities and changing needs of the academic scholarship of archaeology.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Guha, Sudeshna

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Geschichtswissenschaft: Theorie und Methoden

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Histories, Historiography, Archaeology: An Introduction
Antiquarianism and South Asia: Questioning Histories of Origins
Nineveh in Bombay: The Curation of Foreign Antiquities and Histories of India
The Connected Histories of Philology and Archaeology
Fashioning the Unknown: Gordon Childe’s Imprints upon the Indus Civilisation
Civilisation, Heritage and the Archaeological Scholarship
A Vision for Archaeology: Partition, Nationalism and the 'Indian' Pasts
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Guha, Sudeshna
Sudeshna Guha is an Associate Researcher at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (FAMES) at the University of Cambridge and Tagore Research Scholar at the National Museum in New Delhi. She has curated photographic collections at Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge) for over a decade, and was Temporary University Lecturer of South Asian History at FAMES for four years. She researches on the cultural histories of archaeology and photography in South Asia, and continues to study aspects of state formation, polities and urbanisation in Early India, which had led her to study archaeology and the Indus Civilisation after graduating in history.

She has written extensively on issues related to the historiography and methodology of the archaeological scholarship of Ancient India, of which an example is her edited volume The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Alkazi Collection of Photography and Mapin, 2010). The four essays below illustrate some of the reasons that have led to the present study: ‘The Visual in Archaeology: Photographic Representations of Archaeological Practice in the Indian Subcontinent’, Antiquity (2002); Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology and the Indus Civilisation’, Modern Asian Studies (2005); ‘Material Truths and Religious Identities: The Archaeological and Photographic Making of Banaras’, in M. S. Dodson (Ed.), Banaras: Urban History, Architecture, Identity (2012) and ‘Beyond Representation: Photographs in Archaeological Knowledge’, in O. M. Abadia and C. Huth (Eds), ‘Speaking Material: Sources for the History of Archaeology’, Complutum (2013).

Currently, she is doing research on the practices of museums, archaeology and heritage-making within post-colonial South Asia.