Speaking Archaeologically™

April 21,2018 "You've got to be KIDDING ME!" I couldn't keep my voice down as the exact episode from our Rampur Jungi Adventure repeated itself before my eyes. Here we were, in the middle of nowhere once again—this time 38 kms to the south-west of our site—outside what was definitely a modern temple located by the banks of a  Taal (lake). Divyansh was beckoning me from the entrance of the temple, his face shining with the thrill of another discovery and I was staring at him in disbelief from the passenger seat of my uncle's car. This time, Mayank happened to be on the site with us instead of Priyanshu—an out-of-season recruit, who found himself involuntarily dragged into the Preliminary Survey Team of the Bhima Devi Project, instead of being taught how to study Indus Valley Pottery like I had promised him. I am sure the poor kid was baffled as a rooster confronted with a light bulb because in a single day, he had been dragged through three archaeological sites, un...

January 18,2018: Nearly a month into Bhima Devi Project, Preliminary Surveys  It was nearly three years ago that I had first visited the site of Rampur Jungi with the unlikeliest crew: my maternal uncle at the helm of the wheel of my mother's blue Alto, my cousin, who was more interested in the phones we held than where we were going and two freshly recruited students of the SA Research Wing from the Department of Anthropology at the Panjab University.  There was nothing remarkable about the journey. Pinjore, after all, is the least remarkable town in the world if you don't know what I do and even if you did, the whole affair ends there.  Why, then, would this journey be remarkable?  On the contrary, it was a rather unnecessary and most likely a futile visit the way I saw it —a visit to a random, obscure village near Pinjore, that was right on the border of Himachal and Haryana, and the promise it held for me that morning, was thinner than the guarantee of spott...

Quick Question: Exactly when does an idea become so big that it is worth fighting for? Quicker Answer :  When it literally springs to life before you the minute you hold it in your hands. This journal, that we have spent nearly two months talking incessantly about like a pirate's parrot that has accidentally gotten high on rum, first came to life in my hands in the small canteen below the Victorian mansion in Shimla that is now the Himachal State Museum. This was an Object Analysis session where each member had a personalised hand-out and a worksheet, and typical of all Speaking Archaeologically Events back then, it would have been the task deadline for the Season 3 Members that night, in which, each student would be submitting a paper on one of the many aspects of Bhima Devi Temple.  Interestingly, by now, everyone had already submitted a paper or quit on the pretext of "too soon," "too many assignments in the college," "too much on my plate a...