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Pages: 7 - 9 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 7-9, May–November 2021.
Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:39Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211062715 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Authors:Andrew M. Bauer Pages: 17 - 55 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 17-55, May–November 2021. Definitions of ‘historical archaeology’ frequently imply the use of documentary sources to contextualise the archaeological record and aid interpretation of its content. In this article, I underscore the importance of a complementary process of using the archaeological record to enrich interpretations of epigraphical sources from the medieval Deccan. Going beyond others’ critical calls to evaluate how interpretations of these inscriptional sources are shaped by biases in research practices, I will suggest that the substantive content of politicised donative stelae on the Raichur Doab was related to shifting material contexts of agricultural land use and the dynamic assemblages of cultigens, soils and water that facilitated production during the period. By contextualising inscriptional records and donative practices within an archaeologically documented landscape of changing production activities, one has a stronger epistemological basis for evaluating the social and political significance of the inscriptional archive and the historiography that it affords. In this case, it allows for the re-evaluation of historiographical tropes of the Raichur Doab’s value as ‘fertile’ agricultural space and provides a richer interpretation of how newly emergent social relationships and distinctions evident in eleventh–sixteenth-century inscriptions articulated with landscape histories. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:17Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211053686 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Anne Casile Pages: 56 - 91 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 56-91, May–November 2021. Instabilities of the monsoon climate system, along with alternating periods of severe dryness and wetness, are known to have punctuated and disrupted the lives of peoples and institutions across Asia during medieval times. As far as India is concerned, the topic has attracted little attention from historians and archaeologists.Did climatic variations play a determining role in societal changes in medieval times' The aim of this article is not to answer, but to raise and refine this question by calling for new interdisciplinary initiatives which would enrich our reading and understanding of the past and contribute different threads to the narratives of medieval history and archaeology. While doing so, it highlights two lingering ‘lacks’ underlying the well-established historiography: the lack of attention to nature, and thus to climate; and the lack of archaeology. Attention is then focused on recent advances in palaeoclimatology and in research linking climate and society, in which India is yet to find a substantial place. Finally, the article outlines prospects and openings for the study of the medieval past as it relates to the climate-water-society nexus, by presenting an ongoing project called MANDU exploring histories and archaeologies of the land-waterscapes of Mandu in Central India. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:36Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211056147 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Eduard Fanthome Pages: 92 - 129 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 92-129, May–November 2021. Current scholarship on medieval South India has developed a comprehensive account of the ways in which political claims were constituted by dynasts and their subordinates in a range of contexts, from imperial courts to provinces. It has elaborated the modalities of political claim-making through instantiations of politico-cultural traditions or ‘cosmopolises’, and the integrative processes and social changes associated with them. However, this scholarship largely focused on imperial capitals and secondary urban settlements, which constituted nodes in the political networks of polities and loci of contestation and integration within them. Regions in which cosmopolitan traditions did not inform political practice remain opaque to this historiography.This article investigates one such contest- the ‘contested’ Raichur Doab. It explores the politics of the production of a settlement- MARP-30 and the ways they were negotiated to constitute relations of inclusion and exclusion.MARP-30 is part of the multi-component site at Maski that during the period of MARP-30’s occupation does not evince evidence of cosmopolitan practices. Examining the constitution of socio-political relations in this context will expand our understanding of political practice in medieval South India to include practices inaccessible through texts and under-explored archaeologically, and yet typical of medieval South India given the political and social dynamism that characterize the medieval period. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:14Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211052727 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Jason D. Hawkes Pages: 130 - 170 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 130-170, May–November 2021. This article shifts discussion of the medieval in South Asia away from conversations about ‘what’ took place towards ‘how’ it is studied. Following a brief review of what defines the South Asian medieval, this article starts with the premise that the entire period has not been studied archaeologically and that there is a great deal of potential in doing so. This potential is explored with reference to recent work in Central India, which has investigated a particular set of developments in which socio-economic histories first located the transition from the ancient to the medieval in South Asia, namely, royal grants of land to Hindu temples in the fourth to seventh centuries ce. Considering these land grants as archaeological objects and situating them in the very landscapes they existed within reveal a great deal of new information about early medieval social formation and the transition to the early medieval in this region. In presenting this research, I demonstrate not only the potential value of an archaeological approach to the study of the period but also the necessity of it. Consideration then turns to the directions and form(s) that a ‘medieval archaeology’ might usefully take in the study of South Asia, which by no means shares the same empirical (text–object) and theoretical (historical–archaeological) relationships as the study of the medieval elsewhere in the world. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:23Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211054352 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Mannat Johal Pages: 171 - 206 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 171-206, May–November 2021. This article examines how people formed and negotiated relations to time in routine engagements with materials and places in medieval South India. Questions of history and memory, which have become central to our understanding of precolonial Indian social and political practices, are frequently considered in relation to courtly epigraphical and textual production or monumental building projects. Positing that experiences of time are formed in everyday acts of production, consumption and maintenance, this article problematises the term ‘social memory’ to propose an alternative framework for exploring temporal relations: the concept of historicity. Historicity provides a robust analytical vocabulary for discussing how historical actors inhabited their own present, how they oriented themselves towards pasts and futures, and the kinds of timescales that both framed their actions and were formed in action. Operationalising this framework, I build on an analysis of excavated ceramics from a twelfth- to thirteenth-century settlement at Maski (northern Karnataka) to foreground the diverse ways in which individuals and communities drew upon available pasts and acted with initiative within an intersubjective present world of tasks and activities. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:32Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211048996 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Hemanth Kadambi Pages: 207 - 243 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 207-243, May–November 2021. Agro-pastoralism has been an important economic subsistence among diverse communities in the semi-arid climate and dry-deciduous ecology of the Deccan for the last four millennia. Recent research that looks at the entanglements of human-animal-environment relations in South Asian archaeology and history have highlighted the complex histories that prompt a reconsideration of the contexts within which political authority articulated in medieval India. This essay demonstrates the presence of non-elite agro-pastoral groups based on the evidence from my archaeological survey. I then present results from a limited study the Early Chalukya inscriptions to identify agro-pastoral activities. In addition, I employ limited architectural and iconographic analysis and argue that the non-Brahmanical religious affiliations of pastoral groups played a role in shaping the political and sacred landscapes of the Early Chalukya polity (ca. 550–750 ad) in the Deccan plateau of South India. A related aim in this essay is to highlight the productive engagement of archaeological investigations with ‘conventional’ history research. I suggest that the medieval period of Indian archaeology is a potent arena for such interdisciplinary research. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:24Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211054593 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Mudit Trivedi Pages: 244 - 280 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 244-280, May–November 2021. Do archaeology and history refer to the same real past' Their relationship has been understood primarily as epistemic, as one of the distinct techniques for knowing different aspects or epochs of the past. When archaeologies of more familiar, historical, medieval pasts are conducted, why do these accounts enthusiastically find and lose, provoke and distress, their specialist kin; or why do historiography and archaeography relate uneasily'This article argues that it is useful to think of archaeography and historiography as two sensibilities, two activities, and following de Certeau, as two operations. Each operation is governed by distinct protocols of generalisation, different aspirations of synthesis, distinct poetics that govern their texts and the account they wish to give of their subjects. Appreciating these differences, this article focuses on the foreclosures shared by both operations with reference to the tangle of the medieval. It asks, what comes to count as evidence and how, which questions arise and why, and what aspects of pasts termed medieval appear familiar, alien, or interesting. From these questions it builds an account of what archaeology can disclose about shared modern historicist commitments to the medieval and those uneasily kept out of its scenes.This article grounds these questions through an engagement with South Asian medieval historiography on the theme of settlement. First, through a genealogy of settlement it examines the reasons for the concept’s centrality to accounts of medieval life, (modern) politics and the state. Through examples drawn from research in Mewat, it examines what these commitments to thinking about settlement disable and enable, the questions its assumptions exclude. It demonstrates how archaeologies of settlement bring into view questions of anteriority, and how attention to spatial relations of remove and accrual reverse figure and ground in accounts of dwelling. In light of these disjoinders, it asks, must we continue to close our operations, to write our medieval, in the manner we do' Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:20Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211055884 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Supriya Varma, Jaya Menon, Deepak Nair Pages: 281 - 319 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 281-319, May–November 2021. For a considerable span of human history, following the adoption of agricultural economies but prior to the emergence of settlements that we label as ‘urban’, small permanent communities or ‘villages’ were the main types of settlements, as also were places intermittently occupied by mobile, nomadic groups. The context of these, however, differed from those small or rural settlements that existed within an integrated network of centres in urban and state societies. A third scenario is the case of small-scale rural settlements that may exist at the margins of complex societies and, hence, outside state/political control but could still be socially and economically networked with other centres. Thus, the concept of ‘rural’ needs to be situated and interrogated within specific political, social and economic contexts.While archaeological research has addressed village settlements in pre-urban periods, once urbanism and the state societies emerged, urban settlements became the focus of attention. Even though surveys have shown the distribution of settlements of varying sizes, we do not seem to know much about early historic and medieval villages, in terms of settlement layouts, domestic spaces, crafts, if any, or even subsistence practices. It is this lacuna that we are trying to address through our work at a small, rural settlement in the Upper Ganga-Yamuna Doab. Some of the questions that we raise in this article deal with terms like ‘urban’, or ‘rural’, whether these should be viewed as binaries, or whether it may be more fruitful, as others have suggested, to see settlements in a continuum. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:30Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211052719 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Brian C. Wilson Pages: 320 - 352 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 320-352, May–November 2021. What do we know of early modern colonial urbanisms in South Asia' Rich archival sources provide meta-narratives of the ‘rise and fall’ of colonial outposts and their spatial projects. This article revisits these histories through the results of an archaeological project conducted at Portuguese Goa. In settings such as Velha Goa, histories of the city are unavoidably structured by elite, top-down understandings of social processes, principally owing to the limits of the colonial archives themselves. Quotidian material transformations, essential to urban process, remain largely unconsidered. In Goa, the archaeological data suggest the dominant historical narratives that characterise this capital of empire as the ̒Rome of the East’ work to substantiate a vision of the city that erases other socialities. The archaeological data allow us to productively think of the colonial early modern urban landscape as both a physical and conceptual façade. Historical tropes of ruination mask rich and varied archaeological evidence of enduring forms of urbanism. The idea of the city as façade allows at once a characterisation of the concealed failures of colonial urban governance and its legacies in perpetuating certain ideals and understandings of urbanism, and it questions narratives of urban decline that still resonate today. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:22Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211047094 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Anwesha Das Pages: 353 - 358 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 353-358, May–November 2021. Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 301. ISBN: 978-1-316-62627-6 (Paperback). Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:27Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211041190 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Shobhna Iyer Pages: 358 - 362 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 358-362, May–November 2021. Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017, Paperback, 422 pp. ISBN: 9780199477692 Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:34Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211047082 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Jaya Menon Pages: 363 - 367 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 363-367, May–November 2021. Cameron A. Petrie (with contributions by P. Magee, F. Khan, J. R. Knox and K. D. Thomas), Resistance at the Edge of Empires: The Archaeology and History of the Bannu Basin from 1000 BC to AD 1200. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books, 2021, pp. i–xxviii, 508. ISBN: 978-1-78570-303-4. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:28Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211042217 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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Authors:Erin P Riggs Pages: 368 - 372 Abstract: The Medieval History Journal, Volume 24, Issue 1-2, Page 368-372, May–November 2021. Alfredo González-Ruibal, An Archaeology of Resistance: Materiality and Time in an African Borderland. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014, pp. 381. ISBN: 978-1-4422-3090-3. Citation: The Medieval History Journal PubDate: 2021-12-14T12:41:28Z DOI: 10.1177/09719458211042218 Issue No:Vol. 24, No. 1-2 (2021)
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