Andrew Bauer, under the supervision of Dr. Kathleen D. Morrison, will investigate the social and political dimensions of ancient human-environment interactions in the Tungabhadra River Valley of South India. More specifically, this research explores the connections between the emergence of pronounced social distinctions during the 1st millennium BC and the creation of a cultural landscape that included wild and domesticated agricultural staples, irrigated rice agriculture, water reservoirs, pasture land, monumental mortuary complexes, and ritual caves. This research addresses these relationships by examining social differences in agricultural production and consumption activities through analyses of botanical remains from a large Iron Age (1200-400 BC) residential site in northern Karnataka, South India. The botanical analyses will be situated within a more general consideration of landscape history, which will be investigated through a systematic archaeological survey, as well as geo-archaeological and stratigraphic pollen analyses to document landform and vegetation changes during the period. Patterning among these multiple lines of evidence will indicate how socio-cultural landscape production partly created the material conditions that constrained and enabled the development and negotiation of socio-political inequalities during the period.
More broadly, this research will make significant contributions to archaeological education, training, preservation, and knowledge dissemination. The project will be carried out in close affiliation with Indian archaeologists - including students - at several Indian institutions, and the resultant database of newly documented sites will be disseminated to all parties involved to assist plans of increasing the number of protected sites in the region. In addition to facilitating archaeological training and preservation efforts in India, participants in this research project will continue to disseminate their findings in scholarly venues in India, the United States, and elsewhere around the world. Furthermore, this research will provide the bulk of the data to be published in Bauer's doctoral dissertation, and thus will make a significant contribution to the education and training of natural and social science scholars.
