With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Monica L. Smith and a team of colleagues from the United States and India will conduct three field seasons of archaeological research at the ancient city of Sisupalgarh, India. This well-preserved archaeological site, dating to the early centuries BC/AD, consists of monumental architecture within an urban core zone over one square kilometer in size surrounded by a rampart wall that still stands up to 9 meters tall. Previous mapping and reconnaissance work at the site carried out by this team shows that beyond evidence for leadership, the city also contains the remains of many thousands of ordinary households. The current project will consist of excavations of selected areas of the site to understand the composition of those households and why people chose to settle in an urban zone. In contrast to many archaeological research projects focused on urban origins, our project seeks to identify the economic and social factors that sustained long-term urban occupation, and how ordinary households integrated themselves into the life of the city.
The excavations also will generate a comprehensive series of radiocarbon dates to identify the site's development over time. These dating methods will enable us to test whether Sisupalgarh developed as a sequential reaction to urbanism in the Ganges Valley, or whether urbanism was a predominantly local development. Evidence for local development, as is already suggested by the overwhelmingly local character of the artifacts thus far found at the site, would support new theories of urbanization that show ancient cities thriving on the basis of robust local economies rather than long-distance exchange.
In conjunction with the excavations, the team also will utilize subsurface non-destructive mapping to trace architectural features in neighborhood-sized areas at Sisupalgarh. Neighborhoods are an important grouping in cities, but represent areas that are too large for conventional excavation methods. We will utilize the geophysical techniques of gradiometry and electrical resistivity to trace the outlines of structures in areas surrounding the excavated households, with the goal of producing architectural maps for areas several hectares in size. This project represents a pioneering use of these subsurface mapping techniques in India, and the first large-scale study of whole neighborhoods within an ancient Indian city.
The intellectual merit of the research will be to evaluate an ancient city as a social construct in which all classes of society participate, and to provide a well-documented South Asian case of premodern urbanism that can be compared with other archaeologically known regions.
The broader impacts of the research project include significant international collaboration between Indian and US researchers and students; provision of data for theses and dissertations for both Indian and US students; training of students in archaeological field techniques and analysis; and provision of resources for university classes and public presentations.
