Some Reflections on Jean-François Salles’s (1944–2023) Work in South Asia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Maritime Archaeology of the Indian Ocean
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History
The interface between the sea and the land and the communities that have historically traversed the Indian Ocean form the focus of this article. Maritime communities have been sustained by a variety of occupations associated with the sea, such as fishing and harvesting other marine resources, pearling, salt making, sailing, trade, shipbuilding, piracy, and more. The communities of the sea negotiate land-based issues through a variety of strategies, which are evident in the archaeological record. Fishing as an adaptation dates to the prehistoric period, and fish remains have been found in abundance at several coastal prosites dating from the 5th millennium BCE. In eastern Saudi Arabia, for example, they constitute 85 percent of the total faunal inventory at some sites. A significant factor facilitating the integrative potential of these communities was their large cargo-carrying vessels, which not only facilitated transformation of the local settlements into centers of commerce and production, but also linked the local groups into regional and trans-regional networks. Underwater archaeology has contributed to an understanding of the boat-building traditions of the Indian Ocean, further supplemented by ethnographic studies of contemporary boat-building communities. Monumental architecture along the coasts served dual functions. Not only did they provide spaces for the interaction of inland routes with those across the ocean, but the structures themselves were also used as major orientation points by watercraft while approaching land. The larger issue addressed underscores the need to include coastal structures such as wharfs, forts, shrines, and archaeological sites as a part of the maritime heritage and to aid in their preservation for posterity.
2011_The Development of Maritime Archaeology
A. Catsambis, B. Ford, And D. Hamilton, eds.,The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology, 2011
THE importance of maritime cultures to the history of humankind is clear. Only by watercraft have some areas of our planet, from Australia to the smaller islands of the Earth's seas and oceans, been discovered, explored, settled, exploited, supplied, and defended. The myriad uses of watercraft include fishing and whaling, the transport of goods and people, warfare, exploration, and recreation. Watercraft require crews, usually drawn from the people living near the coasts. Additionally, watercraft require "homes;' from simple sloping shores on which they may be beached to large and complex ports and harbors, the latter requiring specialized workers both for construction and later for utilization. These workers, in turn, as well as sailors, porters, merchants, and their families, require an infrastructure of support that includes at least temporary or permanent living quarters, suppliers of food and other essentials, land transport, maintenance installations including shipyards and chandleries, and financial, storage, and entertainment facilities.
2011_The Development of Maritime Archaeology_OHMA
Alexis Catsambis, Ben Ford, and Donny L Hamilton, eds., Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology, 2012
THE importance of maritime cultures to the history of humankind is clear. Only by watercraft have some areas of our planet, from Australia to the smaller islands of the Earth's seas and oceans, been discovered, explored, settled, exploited, supplied, and defended. The myriad uses of watercraft include fishing and whaling, the transport of goods and people, warfare, exploration, and recreation. Watercraft require crews, usually drawn from the people living near the coasts. Additionally, watercraft require "homes;' from simple sloping shores on which they may be beached to large and complex ports and harbors, the latter requiring specialized workers both for construction and later for utilization. These workers, in turn, as well as sailors, porters, merchants, and their families, require an infrastructure of support that includes at least temporary or permanent living quarters, suppliers of food and other essentials, land transport, maintenance installations including shipyards and chandleries, and financial, storage, and entertainment facilities.
Project Mausam: Maritime Cultural Landscapes Across the Indian Ocean
‘Mausam’ or Arabic ‘Mawsim’ refers to the season when ships could sail safely in the Indian Ocean and these seasonal monsoon winds underwrote both a shared culture in the past, as also the continued survival of maritime regions into the present. ‘Maritime cultural landscape’ was used by Olof Hasslof, the Swedish maritime ethnologist in the 1950s to indicate an understanding of the use of the sea by humans and included attendant coastal structures and cultural identifiers. The papers in this book examine the development of coastal settlements and architectural remains from the third millennium BCE Bronze Age to almost the present across a large part of the Indian Ocean extending from Arabia to Vietnam. A second objective of the book is to relate this understanding of the past with that of the present and to highlight the extent to which indicators of historical cultural networks provide building blocks for contemporary societies, as they work towards universal values and trans-border groupings – both of which underwrite UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention. The Convention encourages the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity, thereby focussing on the universal, rather than the local or regional. The book will appeal to readers of maritime history, as well as those involved in heritage studies.
Maritime Archaeology and Sri Lanka
Globalization, Immigration, and Transformation in the Underwater Archaeological Record Assuming that maritime archaeology conducted in Sri Lanka is new to most readers, the present paper has been written with a dual purpose. First, it tries to give some background to the birth and growth of the discipline in this country and shows its involvement in ICOMOS––ICUCH (International Council on Monuments and Sites––International Committee on the Underwater Cultural Heritage) activities. Second, it tries to deal with the focus of the 2013 SHA conference by addressing three sites, each of which can be developed into a case study relating to the conference themes. Sri Lanka was always a place where East/West shipping interacted, whether before or after A.D. 1500, and was also always conscious of the looming presence of India. This paper, however, deals only with material aspects in the period after 1500.
2004
Abstract: Marine archaeology, also known as maritime, nautical or underwater archaeology deals with the 'scientific study of the material remains of man and his past activities on the sea'. Marine archaeology has made tremendous progress in India.