Excavations at Paithan, Maharashtra

Abstract

Preface ix and Mr R. Knox, former Keeper of the Dept. of Oriental Antiquities of the British Museum.Throughout the project Dr Michael Willis was a guiding light in all aspects of work from the organizational and administrative to the academic. A great debt of gratitude is owed him.We are grateful to all the members of the excavation teams, especially

A stable isotope perspective on archaeological agricultural variability and Neolithic experimentation in India

“…Despite being in a drier zone, the rice from Paithan does not look drier than the rice from the East Indian sites and looks similar in wetness to the modern irrigated samples from the same region. The stable isotope data coupled with the evidence of irrigation channels at the site (Kennet et al, 2013) indicates that Paithan shows evidence of irrigation and manuring. This confirms that the establishment of rice in the Deccan required both watering and social readiness to invest the requisite labour (Fuller and Qin, 2009;Fuller et al, 2011).…”

Grounding texts and theories of societal change

“…Sawant 2008) or drawing attention to how they have been shaped by modern politics (Chakrabarti 2020), archaeologists have studied neither these general developments nor the specific transformations supposedly initiated by the land grants (Kennet 2004; Chakrabarti 2019; Kennet et al . 2020). Archaeological investigations of the broader medieval period extend only as far as excavating monuments prized for their artistic merits (e.g.…”