On Putting Time in its Place: Archaeological Practice and the Politics of Time in Southern India

Abstract

The work of time-making is always a work of the present, and even in its driest form, the archaeological chronology, is a political process. Archaeological practices which make time from space necessarily dissect unified material landscapes into temporal slices, ‘cuts’ of time and space that can either mute or give voice to past interactions with material landscapes, engagements sometimes called ‘the past in the past.’ Despite the fact that historical and archaeological remains in India are often central to political contestation, the structures and objects studied by archaeologists and art historians are typically viewed as straightforward exemplars of past periods, dynasties, or cultures, disappearing from gaze as they leave the period to which they ‘belong’. This article considers some forms of interaction between people and places in southern India—from ashmounds to megaliths to temples—interactions ‘out of time’ according to traditional archaeological practice, but which reveal past contestations and concerns. Such forms of landscape history require both analytical techniques such as chronologies which divide time, as well as landscape-based approaches which can heal those divisions by allowing past action ‘out of place’ to be made visible.

Another “education by stone”: An archaeological case study in Brazil's environmental law

“…Following Barad, we might extend a critical understanding of historiography as the writing or construction of time to the techno‐scientific practices that also intervene in the kinds of physical environments—namely those of so‐called developing societies—originally at stake for Nandy and Chakrabarty 9 . This would allow for a more granular look at how history is materially produced not only through what Nandy (1995a, 44) describes as a series of discursive and institutional relationships with “the modern nation state, the secular world view, the Baconian concept of scientific rationality, [and] nineteenth‐century theories of progress” but also through “associations” or “articulations” with what Lefebvre (1991) called “productions of space” and Kathryn Yusoff (2017) has more recently labeled “geosocial strata” (see also Hall 1990; Morrison 2016). 10…”