Speaking Archaeologically™

Inside the Baradari Hall at Sujanpur Tira When a Hamirpuri finds a book on Pahadi art, authored by a Punjabi Civil Servant, stashed in the dusty racks of a Chandigarh museum, and reads about the musings of a Kangra king who was served by an Irishman—where does that imagery take you?  Unity in diversity, that old maxim, does it ring a bell? Oh, spell it out, spell it out: We take you straight to India. Ixnay , not Rushdie’s India, the Real India.  In the sleepy old town of Sujanpur, perched atop an escarpment, lies the grave of an Irishman, who, perhaps, loved the Beas a little too much to be buried next to it. The man’s dying wish granted—to look at it, endlessly meandering through the valley, touching the toes of the half-inch Hamirpur Himalayas.   The 'half-inch Himalayas' from the vantage point of Col O'Brien This little hamlet in the hills, with its narrow alleys, is a graveyard of Pahadi history, where ‘today has built its mud walls from the dust of yesterdays.’...

  Fair Warning: This blog may employ a heavy use of loaded words and statements, and may also exhibit strong tendencies of a fangirl blog.   ‘But we should not be surprised when the natural world (past and present) does not match up to our neat and simple schemes.’   This statement right here is something that I feel is very apt to start this blog with. If our previous blogs on Prehistory were any indication, the past, the present and the future do not always present that simple picture of our imaginations. Pardon me if I repeat myself again, but we, humans, are terrified of the unknown and the mysterious. Constructions of our own simplified imaginations render us with a sense of comfort in face of the looming question marks. Once that veil is taken off, however, an aura of frenzy, uncertainty and fear grips us. And that I feel is the beauty of the ever- changing research in Paleolithic studies. The reconciliation with the reality that Prehistory and Human Evolution will ...

  Let's start with a few "big questions" : How do you define your position in this world and your journey in evolution, with respect to other primates? Who have been our nearest "cousins" in this long evolutionary journey of ours? Who were the Neanderthals? Did they fight with the archaic sapiens, or did they marry and inter-breed? Was there ever a Neanderthal-Sapiens war? Are Neanderthal traits still alive among some of us, or have they completely disappeared? These were some of the questions that I (and all of us at Speaking Archaeologically) were pondering about, the day we sat to listen to Dr. Chris Stringer. I held a copy of his book "The Origin of Our Species" firmly in my hand, going through all the scribbled pages and little notes tucked in between printed words.  "Changing Landscape of Evolutionary History of Upper Palaeolithic Hominins": read the title of Dr. Stringer's lecture. Some of the initial questions that he laid ou...