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Abstract
Tempered by Time delineates some of the temporal scales and relations produced in everyday engagements with materials in medieval (12th-14th century AD) south India by turning to a specific set of artefacts: ceramics excavated from three distinct spaces within settlements at Maski, a multi-period archaeological site on southern India’s Deccan plateau. Crafted by local potters using easily available materials and used for a range of activities including cooking and commensality, trade and transport of goods, these ubiquitous artefacts have typically stood as markers of a poorly defined medieval epoch stretching from ca. AD 600-1500. My analyses of ceramic fragments from excavated contexts dated to the 12th to 14th centuries AD disaggregate the idea of a “medieval” assemblage, positing instead that that the accumulation of vessels and their fragments are specific to place. On the one hand, each of the spaces to which I draw attention were produced by temporal practices of maintenance, clearance, and deposition. At the same time, visible accumulations of materials were themselves temporalizing, generating an “available past” to draw upon, renew and re-work, and potentially structuring future engagements with places in unanticipated ways. Two concerns about narrativizations of time form the point of departure for this dissertation: an emphatic turn towards accounting for the strategic use of ‘social memory’ and genealogical ties in precolonial South India on the one hand, and the overwhelming use of ceramic vessels as indicators of chronology on the other. In dialogue with a rich anthropological literature that foregrounds the temporalities of quotidian routines, this dissertation demonstrates that an attunement to the temporalizing potentials of archaeological evidence and interpretations – methods of classifying objects and representing sequences, as well as the inherently spatial nature of archaeological interventions – is key to accounting for temporal relations as they emerged in practice in the past.
The arguments of the dissertation unfold across three vignettes that center excavated spaces at Maski and the ceramic assemblages recovered from them: a rammed-mud house with repeatedly renewed plaster floors; a well located near this house, associated with overlapping surfaces of mud compacted by heavy footfall and littered with broken fragments of ceramic vessels; and, a pit used as a receptacle for discard during the 14th century, which cut into – and mirrored in form – another accumulation of discarded materials dated to the 13th century BC.
Excavations at these spaces push for a reconsideration of the ways in which quotidian materials and their fragments are temporalizing. On the one hand, temporalities of ceramic use and breakage, and routines of maintenance and renewal produced accumulations of materials specific to each place. At the same time, these accumulations had potential effects. At the well, frequent encounters with older materials not only made the past into a resource on which potters could draw, they also shaped the particular contours of ceramic variability in this space. The carefully maintained house floors evoke a place like a midden where household discard would have piled up, offering possibilities for re-use and re-purposing. And a midden could become an enduring and visible accumulation that – centuries later – “made waste” of a place, setting it apart as a site for the continued deposition of rubbish.