UMMA Brown Bag: Iron Age Landscapes of South India:The Tungabhadra Corridor Archaeological Project by Dr. Carla Sinopoli

Through regional survey and excavations, the Late Prehistoric/Early Historic Landscapes of the Tungabhadra Corridor (LP/EHLTC) project, co-directed by Carla Sinopoli, Kathleen Morrison (University of Chicago), and The Government of Karnataka Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, is examining long-term processes of social, political, economic, and ideological transformations in the Tungabhadra Region

The Tungabhadra River wends through the hottest, driest, and most rugged part of southern India: an area of dramatic granitic inselbergs seemingly inhospitable to dense human occupation.  Yet from the third-millennium BCE Neolithic through the succeeding Iron Age and Early Historic periods, the Tungabhadra corridor was a region of dense settlement and cultural innovation.  Through regional survey and excavations, the Late Prehistoric/Early Historic Landscapes of the Tungabhadra Corridor (LP/EHLTC) project, co-directed by Carla Sinopoli, Kathleen Morrison (University of Chicago), and The Government of Karnataka Directorate of Archaeology and Museums, is examining long-term processes of social, political, economic, and ideological transformations in the Tungabhadra Region for the Neolithic through the rise and collapse of the Vijayanagara Empire.  In this talk, I present some of the results of our recent excavations at the site of Kadebakele, an emergent center of the South Indian Iron Age and Early Historic periods.