Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to invite papers for the following panel:

 

D. de Simone1, J.M. Gandhimathi2, A. Casile3, M. Willis4

1British Museum, London, United Kingdom, 2Government Museum, Chennai, India, 3L'Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), Paris, France, 4ERC synergy project, British Museum, London, United Kingdom

 

Short panel abstract This panel will focus on the relationship between upland societies and lowland polities. Although there is much evidence for both over the longue durée, the ways in which these dispensations interacted, and have been documented, has been largely unexplored despite developed theoretical literatures.

 

Long panel abstract This panel will focus on the relationship between highland societies in the upland areas of South Asia and lowland polities that have been normally centred on royal sites, agro-urban conurbations and networks of trade and pilgrimage. Although there is much evidence for both over the longue durée, the ways in which these dispensations have interacted and constituted each other has been largely unexplored despite developed theoretical literature in such fields as centre-periphery discourse, highland-lowland archaeology, indigenous identities, conflict, property relations and subsistence systems.

 

The convenors of the panel seek to explore new modes of working and thinking about highland and lowland cultures in several ways. Firstly, presentations will be sought that reassess analogous and connected riverine systems and their hinterlands. Secondly, presentations will be encouraged that undertake a re-examination of monuments, sites and archaeological documentation against new understandings of human agency, landscape history, technology and the movement of people, goods and belief systems. Thirdly, presentations will be encouraged that reflect on documentation and historiography, especially library and museum collections of highland material. The convenors are keen to explore how objects and documentation data, removed from their contexts by methods of collection and regimes of cataloguing, can be re-contextualized though interdisciplinary forms of analysis embracing GIS, anthropology and the sociology of landscape.

 

The 25th European Conference on South Asian Studies will be held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 24th to 27th July 2018.

The deadline to submit an abstract is 30th November 2017. Please find the call for papers and more information on the conference on how to submit your abstract here: https://www.ecsas2018.org/call-for-papers/

Please let me know if have any query.

Many thanks.

Best regards,

Daniela

Tabor Foundation Research Assistant: South Asian Archaeological Collections

 

T (UK +44) 020 7323 8232

ddesimone@britishmuseum.org 

 

Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG

www.britishmuseum.org