AUTUMN 2001 - Season Updates
October 21
October 28
November 4
November 11
November 18
November 25
December 2
December 9
December 16
 

SPRING 2001 - Season Updates
January 27
February 4
February 11
February 18
February 25
March 4
March 11
March 18
April 1
April 8
Photos
 
 
 

December 16, 2001

Yesterday was our last day on the site for this season, and we finished up a very good week of mapping the ramparts.  Rather than mapping one single stretch we've decided to look at representative sections of the rampart to evaluate the different construction techniques present on the rampart wall.  As archaeologists, we always need to ask how the information will benefit the research questions at hand; as this project's goals are to see how artifacts and architecture vary throughout the site, the selection of different areas is actually much more beneficial than the representation of only one long stretchof the rampart's surface. At the end of every two or three days, we photocopy the sections mapped by each team member to get a composite map that shows long lines of bricks and collections of stones that mark the uppermost portion of the rampart wall.  We've now mapped sections of the north, west and south rampart, and we look forward to the chance to map other sections in the future.

The last of the lab work has gone well too, and the data will give a good winter's worth of work in computerization and analysis to produce distribution maps based on what we have analyzed thus far.  One thing that is clear is the tremendous variety of ceramic vessels used by the ancient people of Sisupalgarh.  Nearly all of the ceramics are made of the same sandy material--what we think is probably clay from the immediate surroundings of the site--but the forms vary widely from small to large, fancy to plain, and sturdy to delicate.  At the same time, it's amazing to see that the very same forms show up in so many of the collection units, indicating that there was production of pottery at a large scale in which there were definite ideas used by manufacturers and expected by customers.

We've documented our work at the site and with the artifacts in a variety of ways: in maps and on forms, through still photography and digital photography and on videotape.  The information that we've gathered is stored on floppy drives, CD's, portable computers, and on paper (perhaps the most permanent medium of all!).  For now, though, the fieldwork has come to a pleasant and satisfying end as we say goodbye to the site and wish all of our supporters and colleagues happy holidays and a good New Year.

December 9, 2001

We’ve been hit by an unseasonable heat wave-it’s hard to believe from the local perspective, and probably just as hard to imagine from the snowbound regions of home.  The weather has helped to move the crop harvest along, though, and nearly all of the rice that was planted in the summer, our seas of green from earlier this season, has been cut.  It certainly makes travel around the site much easier now that we can walk through the rice stubble again, and we are gradually able to revisit parts of the site that were inaccessible up until now.

This week we have spent most of the time mapping the ramparts, where we can now see vast stretches of architectural remains.  Most of the outlines of structures that we can see consist of brick walls.  Sisupalgarh is like many of the other walled Early Historic site, with a rampart that was embellished with baked-brick walls late in the site’s occupation.  The nature of these walls is pretty interesting, and appears to consist of numerous constructions, made of different sizes of bricks, rather than a single large project.  While we’ve only mapped two sections so far, there doesn’t seem to be the same variety of building materials that we have seen in the interior habitation part of the site.  We look forward to mapping other sections to see what becomes visible next week.

Our lab work continues too, with charts and diagrams serving as the basis for comparing the pottery sherds that we have recovered in the surface collection units.  We are building up a corpus of ceramic shapes that is very diverse, and shows a lot of innovation over time.  Pottery is one of the most expressive of all human crafts, since the same material can be used for so many different purposes: clay can be transformed into bricks, tiles, basins, plates, cups, ornaments, and figurines.  Everything from massive jars to tiny cups and flasks are represented here, and in the drawing process we capture the subtleties of the different forms so that we can compare their appearance throughout the site.  The data set that we are assembling is certainly large enough to answer many questions, some of which we no doubt haven’t even thought of yet.  We look forward to making the information available to others when the project is done, so that new approaches can be undertaken by other researchers.
 

December 2, 2001

Another good week began with the arrival of three new students; our team now comprises people with field experience from the Paleolithic to the medieval, and enough languages to cover the whole of the subcontinent and beyond: Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Oriya, plus English and French are shared by at least two people each.  As one might predict, dinner-table conversations are a lively mix of idioms.  Indian pop songs are also a shared underlying group theme, as well as a keen appreciation of food of all kinds.

Our lab work continues as we sort through potsherds collected from this season and the previous season (see Spring 2001 updates).  However, our fieldwork has shifted to take up a new opportunity that has been presented by the clearance of brush from the rampart.  We can now easily see the surface, and the quantity of materials that represent the last phase of the rampart’s construction.  We had noticed throughout the site that bricks were a prominent part of the architecture, but had been unable to quantify the amount of such architecture on the rampart itself.

To capture information about the types of materials used, we’re making a detailed map of the rampart’s surface.  Each person maps a five-meter wide strip of the rampart onto a sheet of graph paper, marking every brick and stone using a simplified code (solid dot for a brick in a structural alignment, open dot for a loose brick, etc).  At the end of the day, we photocopy the strips and paste them together to get a composite map of 50-meter segments of the rampart.  The results are terrific—hundreds of architectural elements that are evidence of the uppermost structures of the wall.  We’ll continue mapping different parts of the rampart as they become available, and hope to compare different parts of the site to see whether the architecture is the same everywhere, or whether we get variable types of structures that may perhaps indicate the presence of different “neighborhoods” responsible for the upkeep of their section of the rampart.  We might also find that the rampart was uniform throughout, which may indicate instead that the upkeep of this very significant construction was a centrally managed civic project.
 

November 25, 2001

 The festival season had a cataclysmic end in Calcutta: for three days, there were nightly processions of goddesses from their temporary homes in streets and bylanes around the neighborhoods, culminating in a mass congregation at the Ganges where the deities were released into the river.  These processions were accompanied by music at high volume: drum bands, horn bands, and even Bengali bagpipe bands twenty or thirty strong with the musicians dressed in elaborate uniforms.  The effect on traffic was impressive as the processions emerged from side streets into the main thoroughfares.  People waded through the crowd of cars, waving their arms in a massive volunteer effort of traffic control.  The goddesses on their platforms were lit up with bright green and white fluorescent lights, and were often accompanied by many human attendants and clouds of incense.  On Diwali evening itself, candles and little pottery lamps were lit everywhere; even small street stalls had their little flames burning, and the streets were full of people out enjoying the cheerful spectacle.  Diwali is a holiday that brings families together, and there is a lot of traveling in the days before and after the holiday.

 For us, travels have brought the team back to the site, and ready for another field session.   We started the week by visiting the site and looking for areas that had been plowed in the interim; we found numerous small field plots and vegetable gardens and took the opportunity to make collections.  These are important, since they are in between houses and represent the only way to get archaeological materials.  So far, the analysis of these materials have confirmed that our collections are by and large representative of our target era of the Early Historic period (3rd century B.C. to 4th century A.D.).  It has been particularly interesting to look at the decorated wares from these new collection areas, since they present some of the same familiar designs that we have seen elsewhere in the site.

 In the next week, we anticipate beginning a mapping program of the rampart walls, since there is now increased visibility that lets us look at the materials and final form of this massive construction.  In some places, we see bricks and laterite blocks, so the time is right to make a comprehensive map of these materials and see whether there was variability in the use and construction of the rampart.  Combined with the continued analysis of the materials from the collection units, we'll get a view of the way in which private lives and the public sphere were integrated in the ancient city.

November 18, 2001

 With the Diwali holiday approaching, we finished up a section of lab work and took a short break while the students all went home for this important holiday.  With the data entry that we have done for Sisupalgarh, we can now start to see patterns throughout the site.  For example, almost all of the units have some very thin ware, indicating that the use of fine pottery was probably widespread among the ancient site's households.  On the other hand, the distribution of very thick wares is more restricted.  These thick wares would have been used for storage jars or very large cooking vessels, and along with the distributions of other such items might indicate the location of the wealthy zones of the city.  Of course, we need to look at the distribution of all items, from pottery to bricks and architecture, to form a composite picture; nonetheless we now have enough material analyzed to start asking new questions.

 I took the opportunity to go up to Calcutta where I met a number of colleagues who work on archaeological subjects.  There, we talked about new and ongoing research projects in eastern India, following up on conversations that we had started at last spring's Konark conference.  Most interesting have been the conversations about urbanism and how the ancient Indian cities functioned as social and economic centers.  As archaeologists we balance the material questions of urban life with the practicalities of fieldwork.  The nature of our data makes us all confront very practical problems: how can we tell if an ancient site is a "city," as opposed to a series of villages closely packed together?  How large should a site be to be considered a "city"?  And is size the only factor, or are cities also characterized by the density or variety of materials?

 If density is the main criterion, can we quantify our definition by agreeing that a city site should have at least 100 or 200 artifacts per square meter of surface area?  Not only would such a definition put small production sites with lots of debris on the map as "cities," we'd also lose sight of the quantity of perishable items that urban inhabitants used.  We know that ancient cities were full of inhabitants who were not full-time farmers and therefore exchanged the products of their specialized work with others: potters and weavers and cobblers and scribes and musicians did their jobs and exchanged the results of their skills with others to acquire food and other items.  Our challenge is to find the traces of these activities and put the fragments of economic activities into a social context.

November 11, 2001

This week has been punctuated by unseasonable rain from a storm that has been hovering over the coast for the past several days.  The timing is not very good for the crops, which were still recovering from floods during the summer, so that the harvest is likely to be forestalled for a while longer.  The uncultivated vegetation growth on the site is still riotous, despite the steady chewing of goats and cows that by next dry season will greatly increase the visibility of the archaeological materials from the brush and brambles.

The proximity of the modern town to the site grows a little every day, a measure of which is the road that goes out to the site that is now lined with houses, a temple, a yard selling concrete, and temporary housing for workers building new structures.  There's movement of other species as well: the other morning we found a band of very robust-looking langurs hanging around the entrance to the site, no doubt waiting for a chance to dash into someone's kitchen and run off with a handful of snacks.

Our hands are full of...potsherds.  The steady accumulation of data is yielding enough information to start generating distribution maps for analysis, using the program Surfer to generate plots that show where different types of materials can be found.  About every other day, we go out to the field and look for new areas to collect, so that work is proceeding on both the collection and the analytical front.  We'll have a small break for the festival of Diwali, and then return to the fieldwork for another good month of data collection and analysis.

November 4, 2001

Another week of lab work and collections add to the growing body of information that we can provide about the site. This is a good time in the life of a project, when methods and strategies are put to their full effectiveness by people who work well as a team and every day brings a sense of accomplishment (there are two other stages to a project: the very beginning, in which everything from typology to transportation is being worked out for the first time; and the end, where there are always a few loose ends to tie up, collections to be packed, and more new data coming in from the field, often with very exciting results at the last minute).

Our collection strategies are taking us to some surprising places, including kitchen gardens, some of which are in areas towards the center of the site that had not been plowed for a very long time. The materials that we encounter in those plowed fields are both abundant and of a good size, compared to other areas of the site where repeated plowing has broken up ancient remains into smaller fragments. The types of materials are very similar, however, and fully comparable to the pottery and other artifacts that we have seen from last spring's collections. In the coming weeks, we'll continue to take collections in areas that are feasible, keeping an eye on an area in the northern part of the site that was under crop last December, and therefore due to be plowed soon.

After the Durga Puja celebrations, the holiday mood continues in town. Many stores have hung out banners urging people to do their holiday shopping, and shops that sell sweets are doing a brisk business. These treats are somewhat different from the kinds of candies encountered elsewhere; they're usually made of boiled milk and sugar and taste a bit like a very sweet version of a soft shortbread cookie. There are many different shapes, and some have almonds or walnuts or even bits of edible foil as decoration. The shops that sell these are usually grouped with other small shops into a series typically consisting of a phone/fax booth, a small pharmacy, a stationer's, a dry goods shop, an eatery with a few chairs out front, and a cloth store (since most people buy cloth and have clothes tailored). Any shopping trip involves quite a few stops, but they are all quite close together and since there are many of these multi-shop complexes most people have easy and quick daily shopping within a few minutes' walk, a factor of nearness that we also take advantage of in the evenings when we shop for biscuits and bananas for the next day.

October 28, 2001

This week we did our first collections of the fall season, concentrating on the northern part of the site where there has been a quick turnover of fields from one crop to the next. In between, and just after plowing, we ask farmers if we can enter the field to collect potsherds, ancient brick fragments, and other materials. With the sorting of pottery in the lab, the work of collection takes on a new meaning, as we seek to fill out the picture of ancient Sisupalgarh one additional unit at a time.

We have spent quite a lot of time doing lab work: sorting sherds into categories, and counting and weighing them. The students from Deccan College, who are participating in all phases of the project, have also been entering the data into a revised and improved database (21,000 sherds analyzed thus far). We now have enough information in the database to be able to start plotting different distributions, posing questions such as: where in the site are the finest wares encountered? Which areas have a lot of coarse thick ware, for example that might be used for storage and cooking? Where are the most decorated wares found? This last category may be the one that gives us the best potential links to the region around Sisupalgarh, since some of the decorations are quite distinct. A trip to the library to look at archaeological reports from other sites will be well-rewarded when we have the whole corpus of our decorated wares completed and can see if some designs are shared among sites.

The week was punctuated by the multi-day celebration of Durga puja. The evenings are quite lively in the streets as colored lights are strung across the road and elaborate temporary structures are built to house the goddess. Although India is generally not a place where people stroll at night, Durga Puja is the exception as families come out, dressed in new clothes, to participate in the rituals and celebrations. Just up the road, a local business group sponsored an evening of classical music, which filled the air with music very different from the Hindi pop tunes that we usually hear as the background accompaniment to daily life. On the last day of the holiday, the goddess is immersed in a river or the sea, an event accompanied by even more music and noise, with firecrackers that can be heard late into the night. Although Durga Puja is an especially important holiday here in Orissa, the holiday season has actually just begun, with the holiday of Diwali coming in mid-November.

October 21, 2001

Field seasons always begin with visits to colleagues and research institutions, getting stored materials out and cleaned, welcoming students to the project and reassembling the team.  It is good to be back in familiar surroundings, and to learn about the events of the intervening months. The weather here is quite warm although the calendar says October and the sun is low in the sky with approaching winter.  In recent days the rains have continued, so we have mostly been working in the lab sorting materials from last season.  There are numerous bags of pottery to be sorted, counted and weighed, and it is interesting to see the slight variations from one bag to the next that form the basis of the data set that we’ll eventually use to show distributions of different materials throughout the site.

We also went to the site to assess the current conditions.  Although with the rain we had expected to find the site rather damp, the extent of water and rice fields was impressive.  The whole interior of the rampart area is a solid green of a hundred different shades: dark and shiny vegetation growth from the monsoon, little creepers and grasses in untilled vegetable gardens, and hectares and hectares of tall rice stalks.  The ground surface is hardly visible, and there’s little sign of the abundance of material that we recovered from the same fields when they were plowed last winter.  It’s a good lesson that an archaeological site has its seasons and aspects that may differ wildly, but our recent tour of the site also provides a more vivid picture of the conditions under which the ancient inhabitants lived too.

While archaeologists often use reconstructions of climate to assess how ancient people managed their environments, we don’t often think about the weather, which is a different proposition.  Climate involves factors such as annual rainfall and temperature that provide the parameters under which crops can be grown.   But weather conveys a notion of daily activities, and in walking around the site at this time of year I envision the rain dripping from ancient rooflines, the eternal challenge of keeping clothes and grain dry, the muddy puddles in streets and lanes, and the living areas surrounded by vibrant fields of the new crop.

The long summer is coming to an end, though.  In the evenings there is now a faint coolness (if we try hard to feel it!).  Some of the rice fields are already turning a shade of straw-yellow indicating an approaching harvest.  In town, elaborate temporary structures are being built for the goddess Durga, whose festival of Durga Puja takes up much of next week.   We’ll look forward to sorting more sherds, another visit to the site, and a chance to see the festival in progress.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Our fieldwork began this year with an assessment of the surface conditions of the site. Because the interior of the ramparts (an area about 130 hectares) is a region of active public use, I wanted to structure fieldwork for maximum data recovery in a way that took advantage of what was sure to be changing visibility. The most striking aspect of this visibility is the agricultural fields. About 25% of the site has been used for rice cultivation in the past year. When we first arrived at the site on January 9, all of these fields presented silty, dry and hard-packed surfaces interspersed with rice stubble--essentially providing zero visibility of artifactual remains which we knew to be present since the trimmed boundaries of the fields showed an abundance of sherds and brick fragments. In the past two weeks, the fields have begun to be plowed in the SW corner of the site. So we have taken advantage of this factor and staked out collection units in this area as a high priority.

We also began work with the total station (electronic transit) as a means of efficiently collecting data on topographic points and the occurrence of structural remains such as laterite blocks and concentrations of bricks. Our goal is to map the ramparts all around the site as well as the subtle topographic variations of mounds within the rampart walls. In the SW interior of the site, the very high density of laterite blocks has meant that a high investment of time in data collection, though the resulting maps (in programs such as Excel and Surfer) enable us to quickly generate comparative plots of different types of building materials. These base maps will also be used afterwards in the plotting of different artifact types to compare the types and proportions of materials found in different areas of the site.

Our collection procedure for the units is based on a systematic, non-aligned random sample within a 50-meter grid. Practically speaking, this means that units are spaced 50 meters apart, but with a random element. Our standard collection unit size is 5 x 5 meters, laid out with red strings to clearly delineate the area being collected. This string unit has a practical purpose as well since it clearly identifies our work area, and by now even the local farmers are explaining to passers-by that we are very strict about looking only in the square! We traverse the square walking (or more often, crawling) shoulder-to-shoulder in a north-south direction; we afterwards turn and cross the unit east-west since we can therefore pick up things that we did not see earlier due to the angle of the sun or the angle of visibility of dirt clumps.

We are highly appreciative of the local farmers' cooperation and interest in the project, which often is carried out in the midst of their own agricultural work: a couple of times, we have found ourselves staking out a unit in a field to which the farmer has simultaneously arrived with a bullock-drawn plow for a second plowing. At these times we simply pull up the strings and come back another day. The rate of planting will also begin to affect our work soon, since some of the fields have gone from initial planting to rice-seedling beds in one day. Once flooded, the rice grows amazingly rapidly, and in many areas we are only 10-15 days away from the fields being planted with rice shoots.

In the lab, we are examining sherds and building a type collection that will enable the assessment of ceramic varieties. Last spring, I had the opportunity to see collections from the 1948 excavations conducted by the Archaeological Survey of India, now stored at the Purana Qila facility in New Delhi. This examination revealed that there was relatively little differentiation of material type in the ceramics. The objective of the type collection is to enable us to consistently identify materials of different wares (fine sand, medium sand, coarse sand) and thicknesses of vessels as well as diagnostic aspects such as rim and base forms, to assess whether the site has different ceramics that could be linked to ancient social factors of production, consumption, and access to goods.

February 4, 2001

In the past week, we have continued to work in the SW corner of the site, collecting units and recording topographic features. On January 31, we walked the ramparts of the site to evaluate the extent to which site conditions had changed since our first initial walk-through last month. I was particularly interested in seeing whether fields in the NE and SE of the site were also being plowed for immediate planting--factors that would require us to collect at least a few units in these areas for comparative purposes prior to planting.

In the SE corner, there are a few fields that have been rough-plowed to break up the soil, but the majority of fields are still hard-packed rice stubble; in the NE corner, there has been no plowing at all. In the northern area of the site, the ready availability of water (pumped up over the rampart) means a different type of farming. Here, there are vegetable gardens with young tomatoes and squash. Plowing has been underway in these areas as well, and with planting imminent, we decided to switch our collection operations to two areas in the N: along the NW corner where several rice fields present good visibility, and the areas of the vegetable gardens. Because of the availability of water in this region, the gardens are likely to see two or three crops (and plowings) a year. However, I wanted to collect at least some units from this area, as it again provides comparative results that we can begin to use right away for the analysis of the site's ancient urban configuration.

February 11, 2001

This week was a lively one, with collections concentrated in the area south of the pillars, as well as in the northern portion of the site.  The pace of planting has increased, so that the site is starting to sport vibrant green patches of rice fields in areas that we examined only a week or two ago.  By looking at fields, we also are learning the array of Indian vegetables and the source of the tasty eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes that end up on our dinner table each evening.

We also have been looking at the areas in the village; each time we cross through we take a slightly different path.  Thus far we have encountered numerous wells and stone-lined tanks (see photo gallery for one of these that we had seen last year).  While the village covers only about 6% of the site, it clearly has been located to take advantage of some of the same natural resources, such as water, that were also required by the ancient inhabitants.

We have also continued to work with the total station, recording data points with a special concentration on the western exterior of the site.  It has certainly been rewarding to come home with topographic data at the end of each day and watch the site materialize in a 3-D mapping program to illustrate areas of brick, stone and earthen construction of the rampart.  We've had a little trouble with electricity at our lodgings, but the local Internet shop has been very gracious about letting us charge our computer batteries there.  Thus, we have been in the curious situation of working on computers by candlelight!  In the next week, we'll continue the mapping process, and move the survey further east to capture information from the rice fields that will soon be planted there.

18 February, 2001

Our data collection strategy has been proceeding on two fronts: the continued work with the total station to gather topographic points, and the collection of sample units to evaluate the distribution of materials on the surface of the site.

Typically, we use the total station to collect points on lines of topography at intervals of 20 meters where the terrain is flat, and intervals of 1-3 meters apart on the ramparts and in areas of mounds within the rampart area.  This allows us to see and record other materials that are also present, such as laterite blocks or concentrations of bricks.  Our recording of these materials will allow the construction of a map that pinpoints the location of different distributions of construction materials, but in the process of data collection we are also building a mental picture of the ways in which the site has a great deal of internal variability.

This variability is also seen in the collection units, staged at 50 meters apart but having materials in variable proportions in a dramatic enough manner that it is often impossible to predict one collection unit's variety of materials (such as thin wares, thick wares, laterite fragments, brick fragments) based on the adjacent square, even when collection conditions are identical.  We are still taking advantage of a high visibility of plowed fields, and have in some ways become a part of the farming community--although our "harvest" of potsherds and stones strike most as being a decidedly odd pursuit, we enjoy the opportunity to interact with the farmers about matters of landscape and agriculture.  The increasing temperature means that the rice seedlings have been growing rapidly, and some are now being transplanted into newly-flooded fields.  In a couple of weeks, nearly all of the interior of the SW portion of the site will be a vibrant green, and we will continue to move our collections

The variability of materials is also found within specific categories, such as the forms of vessels that we see in the site.  Some forms, such as fancy everted rims, seem to come in so many different sizes that there may well have been matched sets with small, medium and large vessels just like we find with sets of china today.  While the complete analysis of the ceramics is still to come, the recognition of forms and fabrics makes the collection process interesting and an ongoing subject of conversation as we creep along each collection unit carefully picking up even the smallest sherds.

25 February, 2001

It's been a pretty exciting week for fieldwork; we have expanded the area of the collections to areas of the site that we had not yet looked at, and we started a detailed map of the area of the pillars in the center of the site.  The weather is getting warmer and the rice is getting planted, so the region is full of activity as archaeologists and farmers make use of the waning days of "winter."

One of the regions that we had yet to collect was in the area immediately adjacent to the W rampart on the interior of the site, a place where recent plowing now allowed us to get a good view of the surface of the site.  Our last unit there was in a field that was starting to get muddy because of water seeping in from an adjacent field; we looked like a pretty disreputable bunch as we headed home that day.  It's a good thing that we have a regular auto-rickshaw who takes us to the site and back, because no one would have stopped to pick us up otherwise!

Another area that we had not yet investigated was the area in the far SE corner of the site.  Here, the village is expanding rapidly but there are several fields that are still used for agriculture.  The SE corner also has a large pond that is used for fishing, and while we were collecting a unit here we were also able to observe net-fishing techniques for catching the finger-sized fish that live in the pond.  We also collected some units just north of the SE gateway, where we are observing variability in the quantities of materials, but the same kinds of potsherds and stone fragments that we have seen elsewhere.  Some of the ceramic vessel forms are very elaborate, and I look forward to comparing them across the site.

Our current mapping project has started up with a detailed map of the central pillar mound of the site, where there are a number of pillars indicative of what clearly used to be an important building (see photo gallery).  In the vicinity of this mound, we have also seen other places where pillars have since been broken off, so that while we see the pillar mound as quite important today it was probably only one of several such buildings near the center of the site.  Although there is much more mapping and collection to be done before the end of the project, we will be taking a hiatus for several days next week for analysis and data management, followed by a targeted collection of some areas that we have not yet investigated.

An additional point of interest this week was the festival of Shivaratri, which is one of the biggest festivals in Bhubaneswar.  From our lodgings, we could see the main Lingaraj temple lit up with decorations, and earlier in the day the festival organizers set up long bamboo railings to help keep the crowds lined up as individuals made a procession to the temple to give offerings.  But big festivals aren't the only events in Bhubaneswar: it's also wedding season, and every day we see processions down the main street: electric music-carts playing Hindi film music, people shaded by parasols, men and boys dancing, and women carrying lamps on their heads.  While India tends to be an early-to-bed, early-to-rise country, wedding season is the exception, and the receptions usually culminate with firecrackers and brass bands in the wee hours of the morning.

4 March, 2001

Time is passing quickly, but this week's results bring us some new insights on both field procedures and the data that we are collecting. We have finished the total station map of the pillar mound, taking several hundred data points to show the changes in topography.  While the mound is covered in brush, there are paths where goats have nibbled their way up the slopes, and we have followed these to take the stadia rod up and down the mound.  We placed the total station at the west, northeast and southeast corners of the mound, and with these three stations we had good visibility and overlap of all of the mound. This gave us good topography, but another mathematical problem was how to precisely measure the height of the pillars.  We were thinking of elaborate schemes involving the measurement of shadows against objects of known height, or the total station's capacity to measure objects without the prism.  Old-fashioned serendipity came to our aid, though, when we noticed that a farmer easily climbed the pillar just as he had since childhood. With his help, we measured the height of the structure.

At the same time as the total station work, we also kept the collection crew working in the vicinity at several units of extremely high density.  The artifact density in some parts of the site is up to nearly a kilogram per square meter (about 2 pounds per square yard).  Much of the weight of the units is represented by ancient brick and tile fragments, but we also collect and analyze hundreds of potsherds. Thus far, I have sorted through about 6000 sherds; while to non-archaeologists this may sound like a lot, think about the diversity of breakable items in even a basic kitchen repertoire.  If your household could only be represented by one breakable item chosen at random, what would it be: a vase? a dog dish? the coffee mug that says I New York? a piece of fancy china used for special occasions, or a plate that you use every day?  One of the great things about pottery is that it is both relatively easy to make, and break.

Because of the large quantity of data that is building up for understanding the site, we took the latter part of the week in the lab putting together a picture of the data that we have thus far, in order to get ready for future fieldwork.  We want to be able to continue doing collections in a manner that is strategic and effective, making use of new opportunities and increasing our coverage of the site to build a comprehensive picture of the past.

11 March, 2001

With the weather getting warmer and the collected materials providing us with a good amount of data, we are shifting more of the time to lab work and decreasing our field time.  However, we are still targeting our collections to take advantage of areas in which new plowing is taking place.  One of the main areas in which this is occurring is near the SE corner of the site, where we previously had relatively little information.  The soil texture here is quite different, with a high proportion of clay so it takes a bit longer to collect the same-sized units as before.  As in the other parts of the site, however, there is considerable variability in the area, so that not all units look alike: some have more thin pottery and fewer bricks, some have more coarse pottery and more bricks, etc.  As we are able to enter the results of the analysis into the computer, some interesting patterns are emerging.

By now, we are a familiar sight in the village and the standard question has shifted from "what are you doing?" to "how much longer will you be here?".  This question is mostly followed by invitations to peoples' houses or gestures towards the sun as reminder that summer is coming.  People are able to track our movements from one part of the area to the other, and it is also interesting to us to see the patterns of land ownership and water allocation over the course of the site.  Water is abundant, and in many cases quite near to the surface, but the sequence of water allocation is sometimes a matter of considerable public discussion.  Meanwhile, the entire SW corner of the site is a vast series of rice fields, which present a beautiful shade of vibrant green with specks of white water-birds that wade through the fields searching out insects, toads, and crustaceans.

We've also continued a series of spring holidays, including the festival of Holi, known as the festival of colors since it's a day when people splash colored water on each other.  On the eve of Holi, there are small night-markets that spring up in the crossroads, with stalls selling brightly-colored powders as well as sweets and little fried snacks.  The next morning,  people start the day wearing white, but quickly become purple, pink and green from head to foot.  It's also not unusual to see the occasional pink dog or purple cow!

18, March 2001

We've almost caught up to all of the plowed fields in the southern portion of the site, so we're always on the lookout for more fieldwork.  This week we were quite lucky in having a new strip of territory open up for collection to the south of the pillar group that is in the center of the site.  In another case, there was a nearby older field that wasn't recently plowed but that still had good visibility.  Both of these cases let us extend the collection area quite a bit further eastwards than it had been.  We also went back to the area of the southern gateway as there are fields there that have also been plowed recently.  Why does plowing matter?  In nearly all fields, even those with rice growing in them, we can see artifacts.  However, one of the main goals of this project is to compare the density and distribution of different artifacts throughout the site as a key to understanding ancient social configurations and urban activities.

Since we collect all artifacts, and often a number of stone items as well, the lab work consists of sorting out this material.  Many of the potsherds are quite large, giving us the opportunity to evaluate the form and size of the vessels when they were whole.  Some of these vessels were giant jars that might have been used for storage, and there are a number of flat open bowls and dishes.  When we dump the collection bag out for washing and sorting, we also get a predictable quantity of little useless rocks and grit, and potsherds that are so fragmentary that we put them into a generic catch-all category.  But we also sometimes get some interesting surprises at the bottom of the bag: fragments of tiny vessels, smaller than your palm, that might have been lamps or shallow cups for spices and ointments; pieces of terracotta bangles that once graced a delicate wrist; little chips of stone that are a testament to someone's patient work in making a bead or a perfectly-shaped stone blocks.

1 April, 2001

This week has been mostly lab work, washing sherds, making drawings, sorting pottery, and getting materials packed away.  It's the least glamorous, but in many ways most necessary, part of archaeology--although you never hear about Indiana Jones spending days sorting wet rocks, much of archaeology consists of looking at minute examples of the human past so that we can have good statistics about premodern human activities.  That's true regardless of the type of site that we are investigating, and the complexities of an ancient city can be found in the varieties of the artifacts that we have recovered.  At the end of the every day, it is satisfying to tally up the materials analyzed, and enter them into the computer to continue our construction of the data base.

8 April, 2001

One of the good parts of fieldwork is being able to share the results with colleagues.  By fortunate coincidence, there was a conference on the Archaeology of Eastern India being held this week at the site of Konark in Orissa, only about 70 kilometers away from Sisupalgarh.  It was the first conference of its kind, and focused specifically on the archaeology of the region (the states of Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, and Orissa).  Many people reported on their finds from recent field seasons as well as long-term projects.  One of the most interesting aspects of this region is the wealth of prehistoric material, including Paleolithic sites.  Although we have yet to hear of early human remains from this region, the abundance of Paleolithic material leaves no doubt about the importance of the region for the study of early human migrations.  There were also a number of papers on the Iron Age and Early Historic periods, as well as some new findings from important 7-10th century Buddh

At the site, I had one last visit to assess the surface conditions prior to departure.  Some of the fields to the northeast were just starting to be plowed now in advance of the monsoon season.  The southwest corner of the site is knee-deep in ripening rice, and the grasslands have sprouted new shoots after some recent showers.  Vegetation can grow extremely quickly here, and the grazing animals are now feasting on the tender grass.  It is also the season for construction, and people are making houses of stone, brick and thatch before the monsoon makes construction more difficult.  And it is nearly mango season--the fruity respite from the beating summer heat.  Throughout the village, there are enormous mango trees, and kids are ready to spend their summer days climbing up to pick them.  Those days are not far off: a couple of days ago, the temperature in Bhubaneswar registered 40.6 degrees Centigrade (over 100 degrees F).

The materials are now packed for storage, and the last drawings and photographs for the season have been taken.  It's time now to go back to the U.S. and examine the data in detail, work on the computer and get ready for the next field season.  The next field season is scheduled to start in October: stay tuned!
 
 
 
 

AUTUMN 2001 - Season Updates
October 21
October 28
November 4
November 11
November 18
November 25
December 2
December 9
December 16

Spring 2001 Field Updates

January 27
February 4
February 11
February 18
February 25
March 4
March 11
March 18
April 1
April 8
Photos