Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Ceramics as a Chronological Indicator

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Mannat Johal, a PhD scholar at the University of Chicago, will investigate how people and societies experience time through their participation in everyday activities of production and consumption. While time is generally understood in terms of quantifiable units such as hours, days, months and years, recent scholarship has highlighted that human experiences of time are diverse, and rooted in activities rather than objective measurements. As a discipline that tracks long-term processes of continuity and change, archaeology is particularly well-suited to tracing the rhythms and durations of a range of activities, everyday acts of cooking and consumption as well as events like death and commemoration. Further, archaeological studies emphasize how relationships between people and the material world - landscapes, monuments and objects - influence how people and societies form a sense of history, and develop their collective memory. These complex experiences of time have been significant historically and remain important in today's world, as seen in disputed claims to heritage, debates over the repatriation of museum objects, and a widespread interest in documenting and preserving traditional practices. Researchers collaborate with scholars and government officials in India to train students and produce knowledge about the past that is disseminated to both academic and non-academic audiences. Additionally, this team of researchers will collaborate with local authorities to create a museum with finds excavated at Maski. Shifting the focus from meaningful monuments to the sphere of everyday life, the research will study how the production and use of ceramic vessels shaped the rhythms of household activities in medieval south India. Ceramic vessels were common objects accessible to a wide range of the population and used for a variety of purposes, such as cooking, storage, eating, and transporting goods. Working with a team of excavators at Maski, located in the semi-arid southern reaches of India's Deccan plateau, the researcher will study how ceramic vessel forms shifted over time, and the ways in which potters created vessels that may have been considered "traditional" or "novel." She will combine evidence from typological analysis with data on ceramic pastes to assess how potters created vessels with varying levels of durability. This research is part of a larger effort to develop a historical archaeology of the Indian Subcontinent. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.