
Daroji Valley
Landscape History, Place & the Making of a Dryland Reservoir System
Kathleen D. Morrison(Author)
Manohar Publishers and Distributors
Published on 1. January 2009
Book
Hardback
316 pages
978-81-7304-779-4 (ISBN)
Description
Landscape history begins with the recognition that both past human experiences and archaeological research are fundamentally focused on specific locales. Locations are defined and made meaningful through processes of place-making, cultural processes that may be multiple and contested but which are never fully divorced from material conditions. Although both scholars and residents of particular places make constant temporal inferences (among others) about settlements, structures, and features, all historical arguments are in fact made on the basis of unified, contemporaneous material (or textual) landscaped in which diverse features jostle together out of time'. It is argued here that traditional time-dissected analyses of long-term histories need to be combined with more unified studies of place in which landscape elements made at one time continue to be used, re-made, remembered, and perhaps forgotten. To this end, this volume identifies several South Indian kinds of places' such as ashmounds, megaliths, inscriptions, hero stones, temples, and reservoirs which played complex and changing roles in the long-term history of one South Indian place, the Daroji Valley. Located in northern Karnataka, this valley served as a corridor of movement during the Southern Neolothic, an iron-smelting locale in the Early Historic, and most dramatically, as an area of food production for the imperial city of Vijayanagara, especially in the sixteenth century. Home to one of southern India's most famous chains of runoff-fed reservoirs, this study examines the ways in which Daroji Valley interacted with larger worlds through time, and explores how and why the dramatic agrarian expansion of the Vijayanagara period led to devastating environment consequences.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New Delhi
India
Illustrations
170 b/w illus
Dimensions
Height: 285 mm
Width: 220 mm
Weight
1318 gr
ISBN-13
978-81-7304-779-4 (9788173047794)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Kathleen D. Morrison is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Content
Making South India: Landscape Histories; Beyond the Local: The Daroji Valley in Time; Roles & Meanings of Some South Indian Places; Vijayanagara Reservoirs: Form, Function & Meaning; The Western Daroji Valley; The Main Valley: West; The Main Valley: East; The Avinamodugu Valley; Making Places: A Long-Term View.