Accepting Variation and Embracing Uncertainty: Creating a Regional Pottery Typology in South Asian Archaeology

Abstract

This article presents the results of the analysis of archaeological ceramics collected during landscape surveys in the Vidarbha of Maharashtra, India; and offers the first attempt at a regional pottery typology for this area. Here, as in many other parts of South Asia, the pottery from archaeological sites have been subject to considerable scrutiny. Yet, so far approaches to their study have focussed on mainly their surface colour and feel. This has resulted in overly simplistic typologies that do not (and cannot) accommodate the full range of variation that exists within a ceramic assemblage, and so limit their value as archaeological evidence. Addressing this, we apply a chaîne opératoire-based approach to the analysis of a ceramic assemblage that we have been developing in this region. This results in a much more complex and detailed pottery typology than has so far been achieved. Throughout this study we also identify points of comparison with familiar parallels published elsewhere. In doing so, the resulting typology, while by no means the final word on the matter, provides a valuable and flexible resource that others working in this region and neighbouring areas can use for their own analyses and research. Moreover, in shifting the bases of categorisation and classification to the ways that pottery was made, we are able to incorporate far more of the variation that exists in the material itself. Indeed, the amount of variation can be somewhat bewildering in comparison to the standard (limiting) typological categories that populate earlier reports, and forces us to question those frameworks. Yet, we argue that it is precisely this sort of uncertainty that has to be embraced if the study of archaeological ceramics for the region of the ancient Vidarbha is going to continue to develop as a meaningful area of archaeological enquiry.

Grounding texts and theories of societal change

“…They fall into four chronological brackets, named with reference to the standard nomenclature for the region (Table 1). These are defined based on our dating of the regional ceramics with reference, for the first time in India, to stratified AMS-dated assemblages (Lefrancq & Hawkes 2020) and the known dates of religious sites. Significantly—such are the lacunae that exist in South Asian archaeology—our dating of the ceramics in Vidarbha represents the first time that remains from the Early Historic period (a period of almost 1000 years) have been parsed into three distinct phases anywhere in South Asia.…”

“…Analysis of the ceramics recovered during the surveys (Lefrancq & Hawkes 2020) adds nuance to this picture. As might be expected with the use of local clays and different cultural traditions, ceramic types varied between survey zones.…”

“…As might be expected with the use of local clays and different cultural traditions, ceramic types varied between survey zones. Yet, during the later centuries BC, a new class of ceramic was produced in the Chammak area that copied the pottery made around Mandhal and Pauni (Lefrancq & Hawkes 2020: 310). This indicates that the early settlement expansion that we see in the region may have been accompanied by a degree of cultural coalescence.…”

“…Details of our methods, analyses and data have been described and made openly accessible elsewhere (Hawkes et al . 2020a; Lefrancq & Hawkes 2020) and are therefore not repeated here. Instead, now that we have completed our phasing of the archaeological sites, we present the results and reconstruct the wider societal dynamics of the region before and during the issue of these charters.…”

Is Domestication Speciation? The Implications of a Messy Domestication Model in the Holocene

“…As Lee et al [8] comment, "the differences between domesticated plants [and by extension animals] and their wild relatives are not always clear". They make this point specifically in relation to archaeological specimens and preservation concerns, but it echoes broader debates within biology about the relationship between domesticates, wild taxa, and the problem of speciation in the evolutionary framework, for example within hominin anthropology [29][30][31], and to discussions about how to apply typologies and classificatory schema within the broad spans of time that archaeology addresses, e.g., [32][33][34].…”