The Archaeology of Modern Worlds in the Indian Ocean
The Archaeology of Modern Worlds in the Indian Ocean
Case studies that show the importance of the Indian Ocean region to the emergence of modernity and globalization
This volume brings together a diverse range of specialists working in multiple areas of the Indian Ocean world, providing broad geographical coverage and comparisons across sites. Contributors use a historical archaeological approach, which bridges everyday life in the recent past with large-scale processes of globalization, to examine topics related to colonialism, labor, race, ethnicity, diaspora, human-environment relationships, and heritage.
Case studies from Zanzibar, Mauritius and the Mascarene islands, India, Indonesia, Java, and other locations emphasize networks and connections across the Indian Ocean. Contributors apply a variety of disciplinary methods, including bioanthropology, analysis of medieval illustrations and colonial documents, architectural history, and anthropology of built space. They discuss the material history of domestic areas, religious structures, and colonial outposts; the structure of the slave trade; and the everyday implications of disease and health management within laboring populations.
This volume decenters European narratives and actors to show the important ways this region shaped the modern world. By highlighting the experiences of ordinary people in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia, the research in these chapters contributes to a better understanding of histories in the Global South over the last four hundred years.
Contributors: Mark Hauser | Julia Haines | Mick de Ruyter | Ellen Hseih | Sakai Takashi | Krish Seetah | Stefania Manfio | Akshay Sarathi | Saša Caval | Alessandra Cianciosi | Adria LaViolette | Neil Norman | V. Selvakumar | Brian C. Wilson| Chapurukha M. Kusimba | Supriya Varma
“A stimulating source of new ideas and data about the archaeology and history of the Indian Ocean world that deserves to be widely read and widely referenced.”—Peter Mitchell, author of African Islands: A Comparative Archaeology
“Makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on the archaeology of the Indian Ocean and the ongoing theoretical, geographic, and intellectual expansion of the discipline of historical archaeology. The contributors present exciting new research and provide valuable insights on the global, complexly entangled processes that shaped modernity.”—Carla M. Sinopoli, coeditor of Object Lessons and the Formation of Knowledge: The University of Michigan Museums, Libraries, and Collections 1817–2017
Mark William Hauser, professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, is coeditor of Archaeology in Dominica: Everyday Ecologies and Economies at Morne Patate.
Julia Jong Haines is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Society for the Humanities and Department of Anthropology at Cornell University.
