Bureaucratic Archaeology

Ashish Avikunthak is an Associate Professor of Film/Media at the Harrington School of Communication and Media, the University of Rhode Island. He is a filmmaker and a cultural anthropologist. His scholarly works have been published in the Journal of Social Archaeology, Journal of Material Culture, Contributions to Indian Sociology and The Indian Economic and Social History Review among other publications. He has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and before coming to URI, he had taught at Yale University.

• Preface; 1. Anthropology of archaeology; 2. Making of the Indus-Saraswati civilization; 3. Bureaucratic hierarchy in the ASI; 4. Spatial formation of the archaeological field; 5. Epistemological formation of the archaeological site; 6. Theory of archaeological excavation; 7. Making of the archaeological artifact; 8. Performance of archaeological representations; 9. The absent excavation reports; Conclusion; Index.

'This book breaks completely new grounds in shifting attention from the history of archaeology in colonial India to the bureaucratic infrastructure and the epistemological landscape of the field in post-colonial India. It undertakes a rigorous ethnography of the inner workings of the gargantuan, state-sponsored edifice of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), to uncover the deep entanglements of the ideology of Hindu nationalism in determining its policies of excavations and the nature of the evidences it has produced on the nation's ancient pasts. Avikunthak's focus on this single institution, its controversial Saraswati Heritage Project, and its excavations of Harappan sites in western India allows for a thick description of materiality and practice - of sites and trenches, of digging and documentation protocols, of the transformation of artifacts into facts, of the hierarchy of personnel, and (not least of all) of the absence of reports. All of this comes together in a gripping narrative that acts as an expose' on the compromised state-sponsored discipline in contemporary India. Unsparing in its criticism of the institution and the archaeology it performs at the commands of the state, this book offers a hitherto-untold ground-level account of the workings of the ASI and its modes of excavating pasts for the present. This is a powerful study whose implications go beyond the domain of archaeology to a larger critique of the institutional apparatus of the nation-state and the politics of knowledge-production.' Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta