During the mid-first millennium AD, new kingdoms and states emerged across South Asia. At this time, land grants made to Hindu temples are thought to have led to wide-ranging societal ...transformations. To date, however, neither the land-grant charters nor the changes they are said to have driven have been studied archaeologically. Here, the authors present the results of the first archaeological investigation of the charters and their landscape context. Bringing together the textual record with a survey of 268 religious and residential sites, the results establish historical baselines against which the longue durée developments of South Asian social, political and economic formation can be profitably re-posed.
Presented here are the data collected during regional surveys of Vidarbha, India, which were collected to reconstruct the societal and cultural changes that took place in this region during the ...mid-first millennium CE. Following an overview of the data and their research context, we describe the methods that were used to collect, process and analyse them. This is accompanied by a critical assessment of the factors that constrained the survey and our results. The dataset is then described in detail, with a thorough account of each data group and how they are arranged, presented and archived. Finally, we discuss how these data can be reused in the continued archaeological study of this region, and comparative studies of site distributions. Funding statement: Fieldwork and research were part of the 'Asia Beyond Boundaries' project, an ERC Synergy project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 609823, awarded to Dr Michael Willis.
This report presents the results of a short programme of fieldwork targeted towards the investigation of the archaeological and geographical setting of the Chamak copperplate charter. This ...inscription, unearthed in the modern village of Chamak in 1868, records the grant of land to a group of Brahmins living in the village of 'Charmaka'. These have long been assumed to be the same place, but the archaeological contexts of the find spot of the charter had never been explored. Preliminary surveys in and around Chamak have revealed a considerable amount of archaeological material, which is presented here. Keywords: archaeology, inscription, survey, Vakatakas, Vidarbha
Large cutting tools have been known for a long time in South Asia and have always been considered to be related to the Acheulian. The character of the Indian Acheulian, however, has not been well ...described and its evolution is poorly known, as there are few sites which are dated. Advances in geochronology have yielded increasingly early dates from most parts of the world where Lower Palaeolithic occupation is documented. These techniques have been barely applied to the South Asian sites but it is highly significant that the dating attempts have provided Lower Pleistocene ages. In this paper the handful of sites for which some chronological data is available and are older than 600
ka are presented. Their assemblages are highly diversified, in composition, but their large cutting tools (especially cleavers but also handaxes) are mostly based on the production of large flakes. They compare well with the early Acheulian from other parts of the world.
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