Archaeological Context and Archival Content: Historical Archaeology and Medieval Period Donative Practices on the Raichur Doab, Southern India

Abstract

Definitions of ‘historical archaeology’ frequently imply the use of documentary sources to contextualise the archaeological record and aid interpretation of its content. In this article, I underscore the importance of a complementary process of using the archaeological record to enrich interpretations of epigraphical sources from the medieval Deccan. Going beyond others’ critical calls to evaluate how interpretations of these inscriptional sources are shaped by biases in research practices, I will suggest that the substantive content of politicised donative stelae on the Raichur Doab was related to shifting material contexts of agricultural land use and the dynamic assemblages of cultigens, soils and water that facilitated production during the period. By contextualising inscriptional records and donative practices within an archaeologically documented landscape of changing production activities, one has a stronger epistemological basis for evaluating the social and political significance of the inscriptional archive and the historiography that it affords. In this case, it allows for the re-evaluation of historiographical tropes of the Raichur Doab’s value as ‘fertile’ agricultural space and provides a richer interpretation of how newly emergent social relationships and distinctions evident in eleventh–sixteenth-century inscriptions articulated with landscape histories.