On the Matter of Resources and Techno‐Politics: The Case of Water and Iron in the South Indian Iron Age

Abstract

Water management and iron production were two socio-technical practices deeply entrained with the politics of emerging social distinctions in northern Karnataka during the South Indian Iron Age (1200-300 BCE). In this article, we approach resources by building a theoretical convergence between -resource materialities‖ and -techno-politics,‖ which allows us to assess the historically specific constitution of certain materials as culturally valued resources while maintaining analytical attention on how assemblages of technical practices and active material properties shape social conditions. By differentially anticipating and responding to the social and material distributions of a range of dynamic matter (for example, granitic rock, iron ores, bloom, and metal, water, soils, and vegetated terraces), Iron Age peoples transformed substances into resources and simultaneously produced a historically unique political sociology of resource relations. Our approach dissolves the processual distinction between natural resource and cultural product and directs attention to how substances become resources through ongoing historical articulations of humans and nonhumans in contexts oriented by cultural values. Contrasting the material properties and distributions of iron and water resource assemblages allows us to more fully understand the distinctiveness of different forms of techno-politics and resource relations within the same cultural and historical context. [resource materialities, techno-politics, resource assemblage, entrainment, South Indian Iron Age]

Dry, rainfed or irrigated? Reevaluating the role and development of rice agriculture in Iron Age-Early Historic South India using archaeobotanical approaches

“…However, it is important to question the likelihood that the altered natural ponds and reservoirs found across the central Southern Peninsula were primarily used for crop irrigation. They are often located on hill tops, without channels to feed water to agricultural fields, and, like Johansen and Bauer (2018), I would argue that a more likely agricultural use would be livestock watering. Pastoralism remains an important economy during the Iron Age.…”

Early water management in South Asia: Geochronology and micromorphology of rock pools and small‐scale water catchment features in Karnataka, India

“…Bauer, 2014; Büdel, 1982; Thomas, 1994). However, archaeological evidence from multiple regions of northern Karnataka has also suggested that human inhabitants both initiated and modified some of these water‐retaining features (e.g., Bauer, 2015; Foote, 1916; Johansen & Bauer, 2018; Munn, 1934). In many cases, people quarried the edges of these features to increase their water storage volume; in others, inhabitants built small “dams” of cobbles and earth to raise the retention level on the “upstream,” exposed, impermeable, granitic rock (e.g., Bauer, 2015; Bauer & Morrison, 2016).…”

“…3000–1200 BCE) and Iron Age (ca. 1200–300 BCE) settlements and dispersed, ephemerally occupied land‐use sites related to herding activities on hilltop terraces that characterize the region (Bauer, 2014, 2015; Johansen & Bauer, 2018). They are also frequently associated with “megalithic” memorial places, which generally date from the Iron Age through the Early Historic Period (ca.…”

“…However, such reservoirs constitute just one of many types of water‐retention features that are known from ethnographic and archaeological research in India (e.g., Bauer & Morrison, 2016). Recent archaeological survey results suggest that the modification of widely dispersed weathering pans and rock pools within the region's inselberg and residual hill tracts had important ties to cultural land‐use practices that predate the development of the large‐scale reservoir systems and irrigation agriculture (e.g., Bauer, 2015; Bauer & Morrison, 2016; Johansen & Bauer, 2018). Yet, much remains to be documented about the absolute ages, function, seasonality, and histories of these features as places within a broader landscape of social practices.…”

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

“…He demonstrates that such representations often overlook the complex and highly situated interplay of past investment and land infrastructure that might obstruct even the most ambitious forms of ecological imperialism. This and other archaeological research are moving beyond studies of adaptation to a “natural” environment and instead are seeking to understand how those who strive to shape the environment must work with the materials and the problems—the terraces, the imported soils, the arrays of infrastructure, the concepts of “resources”—that they inherit from the past (Carson and Hung ; Johansen and Bauer ; Quintus ; Vining ; Wilkinson ). Other studies are going further, challenging environmental histories that cast humanity in a central role by imagining and implementing a “multispecies archaeology” that comprises nonhumans, plants, soils, microbes, and DNA (S. Birch ; Given ).…”