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Long histories in a small region: documenting 3000 years of social and political change along the Tungabhadra River in Southern India

Tungabhadra River Valley
When: 
Thursday, March 7, 2019 - 3:30pm
Where: 
Maxwell Museum/Hibben Center
Cost: 
Free and Open to All
Presenter/s: 
Carla Sinopoli, Director of the Maxwell Museum

The Anthropology Colloquium Series presents Maxwell Museum Director Carla Sinopoli. 

The lecture will be followed by a reception.  Welcome the new director!

 

Long histories in a small region: documenting 3000 years of social and political change along the Tungabhadra River in Southern India

The central Tungabhadra River Valley—the hottest, driest, and one of the most inhospitable regions of southern India— seems an unlikely place to have been a center of innovation and cultural creativity. being.  Nonetheless, from the South Indian Neolithic, through the South Indian Iron Age and the emergence of South India’s largest and last precolonial empire, the inhabitants of the Tungabhadra River Valley domesticated new plant species, invented new technologies, and built one of the world’s largest precolonial cities.  Drawing on her more than 30 years of archaeological fieldwork along the Tungabhadra, Sinopoli introduces the Tungabhadra sequence and places it in the larger context of South Asian archaeology and anthropological discussions of deep histories and historical narratives.

 

Carla Sinopoli earned her BA at SUNY Binghamton and MA and PhD at the University of Michigan.  She came to UNM in October 2018, after 25 years as a Professor and Curator in the Department and Museum of Anthropology in the University of Michigan. Sinopoli has conducted archaeological research in Southern India since 1983, as a member of the Vijayanagara Research Project (1983-1986), co-director of the Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey (1988-1998) and co-director of the Early Historic Landscapes of the Tungabhadra Corridor (EHLTC) project (2003-present). 

The Anthropology Colloquium Series is sponsored by the UNM Department of Anthropology and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology