Durant la période médiévale, les fluctuations du climat ont joué un rôle majeur dans l’histoire des sociétés. Il ne s’agit plus d’une idée hautement controversée, ni d’un sujet à éluder. Les ...indicateurs paléo-climatiques, qu’ils soient de nature biologique, géochimique, sédimentaire ou archéologique, ou proviennent d’archives historiques, sont en nombre croissant ces dernières années et témoignent d’une importante variabilité du climat à diverses échelles du temps, de l’interannuel au plurisé...
Instabilities of the monsoon climate system, along with alternating periods of severe dryness and wetness, are known to have punctuated and disrupted the lives of peoples and institutions across Asia ...during medieval times. As far as India is concerned, the topic has attracted little attention from historians and archaeologists.
Did climatic variations play a determining role in societal changes in medieval times? The aim of this article is not to answer, but to raise and refine this question by calling for new interdisciplinary initiatives which would enrich our reading and understanding of the past and contribute different threads to the narratives of medieval history and archaeology. While doing so, it highlights two lingering ‘lacks’ underlying the well-established historiography: the lack of attention to nature, and thus to climate; and the lack of archaeology. Attention is then focused on recent advances in palaeoclimatology and in research linking climate and society, in which India is yet to find a substantial place. Finally, the article outlines prospects and openings for the study of the medieval past as it relates to the climate-water-society nexus, by presenting an ongoing project called MANDU exploring histories and archaeologies of the land-waterscapes of Mandu in Central India.
The time of the imperial Guptas (c. fourth to sixth centuries CE) represents a pivotal moment in the development of 'mature Hinduism'. This was characterised by many changes, but most conspicuously ...by the establishment of institutional worship in temples. Clear archaeological signatures were inscribed across the cultural and physical landscapes of India in the fourth and fifth centuries: away from zones of urbanisation, numerous settlement areas retain sculptural and architectural vestiges in stone, most of them religious in nature. These vestiges, anchored and distributed in space, and with site-specific contexts, reveal much about the production and reproduction of sacred and socio-economic space, which were inextricably tied to water and the environment.
For the purpose of this special issue, this article focuses on the archaeological landscapes of Baḍoh-Paṭhāri (Vidiśā District, Madhya Pradesh), an historical site which developed as an important population centre from at least early historic times onwards, if not before, and was connected to the political, trade, and defensive networks of the upper Betwā Basin. Some important remains from Gupta and later Gupta times are found in the immediate surroundings of this place. Their study provides an interesting basis upon which to explore issues relating to the conception and spatiality of new devotional, institutional, and socio-economic domains; and the integration, articulation, and transformation of natural features and local geography in the making of gods' territory during this crucial period.
The time of the imperial Guptas (c. fourth to sixth centuries CE) represents a pivotal moment in the development of mature Hinduism. This was characterised by many changes, but most conspicuously by ...the establishment of institutional worship in temples. Clear archaeological signatures were inscribed across the cultural and physical landscapes of India in the fourth and fifth centuries: away from zones of urbanisation, numerous settlement areas retain sculptural and architectural vestiges in stone, most of them religious in nature. These vestiges, anchored and distributed in space, and with site-specific contexts, reveal much about the production and reproduction of sacred and socio-economic space, which were inextricably tied to water and the environment. For the purpose of this special issue, this article focuses on the archaeological landscapes of Ba?oh-Pa?hari (Vidisa District, Madhya Pradesh), an historical site which developed as an important population centre from at least early historic times onwards, if not before, and was connected to the political, trade, and defensive networks of the upper Betwa Basin. Some important remains from Gupta and later Gupta times are found in the immediate surroundings of this place. Their study provides an interesting basis upon which to explore issues relating to the conception and spatiality of new devotional, institutional, and socio-economic domains; and the integration, articulation, and transformation of natural features and local geography in the making of gods' territory during this crucial period. web URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02666030.2014.96 2303 Reprinted by permission
In this article we advocate a return to the consideration and examination of the basic building blocks of archaeological enquiry: the evidence. Reacting to a widely held perception that archaeology ...now understands various commonalities of human experience, we suggest that such concepts and the inevitable oscillation towards “big picture” approaches that stems from them are problematic. They engender a type of scholarship that does not always engage fully with the evidentiary bases of interpretation and that risks assuming a great deal about large parts of the world that have not been studied in as much detail as others. We explore this by looking at the South Asian context, where archaeologists are forced to contend with a number of constraints, chief among which is a relative absence of archaeological evidence. Focusing on one particular sub-region, we piece together exactly what evidence exists and consider what can (and cannot) be said from it. On one level this serves as a useful comparator for those working in other parts of the world who may not appreciate the evidentiary constraints that exist elsewhere. Yet beyond this and simple questions of analogy, we suggest that detailed consideration of an area such as the one presented here forces us to return to even more fundamental questions relating to when archaeological research becomes “interesting”, “ground-breaking”, and “new”; and who decides this.
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.
Fondée sur une enquête archéologique de terrain, cette thèse est consacrée à l’étude des temples dans l’expansion d’un site majeur de l’Inde centrale, Badoh-Pathari (district de Vidisa, Madhya ...Pradesh), entre le 5e et le 10e siècle de notre ère. Le terrain de cette recherche empirique couvre une aire géographique d’environ 80 km² au sein desquels furent découverts un grand nombre de sites et de vestiges provenant de temples et de structures hydrauliques. En considérant que les temples et les ouvrages hydrauliques sont des artefacts historiques organisés dans l’espace et dans le temps, et qu’ils résultent de processus socioéconomiques au sein de contextes écologiques et anthropiques variés, ces travaux se proposent d’étudier non seulement les vestiges de ces artefacts et la configuration structurelle de leur site, mais également le paysage dans lequel ils existent et dans lequel se sont forgées les relations de l’homme avec le milieu, et de mettre ces résultats au service d’une recherche plus vaste sur l’implication et le rôle intermédiaire des institutions religieuses dans le développement d’un centre économique, politique et religieux et d’un territoire agraire à l’époque médiévale. L’étude du site de Badoh-Pa et #7789;h et #257;ri est menée dans le cadre (1) d’un examen descriptif des vestiges et de leur distribution spatiale et chronologique, (2) d’une exploration des particularités géomorphologiques des sites, de la fonction des ouvrages hydrauliques et de leur relation aux sites cultuels, (3) d’une analyse intégrée de diverses sources de données par la mise en place d’un système d’information géographique (SIG).
Based on new data acquired from fieldwork, this Ph.D. dissertation is devoted to the archaeological study of temples and their place in the expansion of an important site in Central India, Badoh-Pathari (Vidisa district, Madhya Pradesh), between the 5th and the 10th century AD. This empirical research covers a geographic area of about 80 km², in which a large number of sites and remains from temples and hydraulic structures were discovered and examined. As historic artefacts organized in space and time and within various ecological and anthropogenic contexts, the remains of these temples and hydraulic structures testify of several interrelated socioeconomic processes in the formation of a centre in early medieval time. This work deals not only with the material of these artefacts and the structural configuration of the sites, but also with the landscape in which they are kept and distributed, reflecting how the dynamic rela! tionship between man and environment were forged. It is crucial to integrate the study of both material sources and landscape in a historical context in order to address the question about the role of religious institutions in the economic, political and religious development of a centre in early medieval time. The purpose of this work is: (1) to examine in detail the remains and their archaeological context, as well as the spatial and chronological distribution of sites, (2) to explore the landscape features in which they are kept, the functions of hydraulic structures and their spatial relation to cult sites, (3) to develop an integrated analysis of various data in the framework of a geographic information system (GIS).
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