Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T10:11:04.878Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Finding history: the locational geography of Ashokan inscriptions in the Indian subcontinent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2016

Monica L. Smith
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1553, USA (Email: smith@anthro.ucla.edu)
Thomas W. Gillespie
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, 315 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1524, USA
Scott Barron
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, 315 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1524, USA
Kanika Kalra
Affiliation:
Archaeology Interdepartmental Program, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095–1510, USA

Abstract

The Mauryan dynasty of the third century BC was the first to unite the greater part of the Indian subcontinent under a single ruler, yet its demographic geography remains largely uncertain. Here, the HYDE 3.1 database of past population and land-use is used to offer insights into key aspects of Mauryan political geography through the locational analysis of the Ashokan edicts, which are the first stone inscriptions known from the subcontinent and which constitute the first durable statement of Buddhist-inspired beliefs. The known distribution of rock and pillar edicts across the subcontinent can be combined with HYDE 3.1 to generate predictive models for the location of undiscovered examples and to investigate the relationship between political economy and religious activities in an early state.

Type
Research
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abraham, S. 2003. Chola, Chera, Pandya: using archaeological evidence to identify the Tamil kingdoms of Early Historic South India. Asian Perspectives 42: 207–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/asi.2003.0031 Google Scholar
Allchin, F.R. & Norman, K.R.. 1985. Guide to the Ashokan inscriptions. South Asian Studies 1: 4350. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.1985.9628331 Google Scholar
Biagi, P. 2006. The archaeological sites of the Rohri Hills (Sindh, Pakistan): the way they are being destroyed. Web Journal of Cultural Heritage 2: 7795.Google Scholar
Brown, R.M. 2009. Reviving the past: post-Independence architecture and politics in India's long 1950s. Interventions 11 (3): 293315. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698010903255536 Google Scholar
Brubaker, R. 2008. Regional perspectives on megalithic landscapes: investigating the socio-political dimensions of Late Prehistoric sites in central Karnataka and western Andhra Pradesh. Antiquity 82 (317): Project Gallery. Available at: http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/brubaker317/ (accessed 4 January 2016).Google Scholar
Chakrabarti, D.K. 2011. Royal messages by the wayside: historical geography of the Ashokan edicts. New Delhi: Aryan.Google Scholar
Common Bird Monitoring of India. n.d. Available at: http://www.cbmi.in/ (accessed 4 January 2016).Google Scholar
Coningham, R.A.E. & Young, R.. 2015. The archaeology of South Asia: from the Indus to Asoka, c. 6500 BCE–200 CE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Coningham, R.A.E., Acharya, K.P., Strickland, K.M., Davis, C.E., Manuel, M.J., Simpson, L.A., Gilliland, K., Tremblay, J., Kinnaird, T.C. & Sanderson, D.C.W.. 2013. The earliest Buddhist shrine: excavating the birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal). Antiquity 87: 1104–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00049899 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeCaroli, R. 2015. Image problems: the origins and development of the Buddha's image in early South Asia. Seattle: University of Washington.Google Scholar
Dermody, B.J., Van Beek, R.P.H., Meeks, E., Klein Goldewijk, K., Scheidel, W., van der Velde, Y., Bierkens, M.F.P., Wassen, M.J. & Dekker, S.C.. 2014. A virtual water network of the Roman world. Hydrology and Early System Sciences 18: 5025–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/hess-18-5025-2014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, P.N. 2003. Infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems, in Misa, T.J., Brey, P. & Feenberg, A. (ed.) Modernity and technology: 185225. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Ellis, E.C., Kaplan, J.O., Fuller, D.Q, Vavrus, S., Goldewijk, K. Klein & Verburg, P.H.. 2013. Used planet: a global history. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 110: 7978–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1217241110 Google Scholar
Falk, H. 2006. Aśokan sites and artefacts: a source-book with bibliography. Mainz: von Zabern.Google Scholar
Falk, H. 2013. Remarks on the Minor Rock Edict of Aśoka at Ratanpurwa. Jñāna-Pravāha 16: 2948.Google Scholar
Finn, J. 2011. Gods, kings, men: trilingual inscriptions and symbolic visualizations in the Achaemenid empire. Ars Orientalis 41: 219–75.Google Scholar
Fogelin, L. 2006. Archaeology of early Buddhism. Lanham (MD): AltaMira.Google Scholar
Ford, A., Clarke, K.C. & Raines, G.. 2009. Modeling settlement patterns of the Late Classic Maya civilization with Bayesian methods and Geographic Information Systems. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (3): 496520. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045600902931785 Google Scholar
Fuller, D.Q, Van Etten, J., Manning, K., Castillo, C., Kingwell-Banham, E., Weisskopf, A., Qin, L., Sato, Y.-I. & Hijmans, R.J.. 2011. The contribution of rice agriculture and livestock pastoralism to prehistoric methane levels: an archaeological assessment. The Holocene special issue: 117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959683611398052 Google Scholar
Harmanşah, O. 2007. ‘Source of the Tigris’: event, place, and performance in the Assyrian landscapes of the Early Iron Age. Archaeological Dialogues 14: 179204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002334 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houston, S. (ed.). 2004. The first writing: script invention as history and process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huynh, A., Ponto, K., Lin, A.Y.-M. & Alko Kuester, F.. 2013. Visual analytics of inherently noisy crowdsourced data on ultra high resolution displays, in 2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference. Big Sky, Montana, March 2–9, 2013: 18. Manhattan Beach (CA): IEEE Aerospace Conferences. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2013.6497421 Google Scholar
Jayaswal, V. 1998. From stone quarrying to sculpturing workshop: a report on the archaeological investigations around Chunar, Varanasi and Sarnath. Delhi: Agam Kala Prakashan.Google Scholar
Joshi, M.C. & Pande, B.M.. 1967. A newly discovered inscription of Aśoka at Bahapur, Delhi. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 99: 9698. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0035869X00125717 Google Scholar
Kalra, K. Forthcoming. Taming the landscape: water management and settlement pattern in South India from ca. 12th to 16th centuries AD.Google Scholar
Kang, BW. 2006. Large-scale reservoir construction and political centralization: a case study from ancient Korea. Journal of Anthropological Research 62: 193216. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/jar.0521004.0062.204 Google Scholar
Keay, J. 2000. India: a history. New York: Grove.Google Scholar
Kintigh, K.W., Altschul, J.H., Beaudry, M.C., Drennan, R.D., Kinzig, A.P., Kohler, T.A., Limp, W.F., Maschner, H.D.G., Michener, W.K., Pauketat, T.R., Peregrine, P., Sabloff, J.A., Wilkinson, T.J., Wright, H.T. & Zeder, M.A.. 2014. Grand challenges for archaeology. American Antiquity 79: 524. http://dx.doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.1.5 Google Scholar
Klein Goldewijk, K., Beusen, A. & Janssen, P.. 2010. Long-term dynamic modeling of global population and built-up area in a spatially-explicit way: HYDE 3.1. The Holocene 20: 565–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959683609356587 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein Goldewijk, K., Beusen, A., van Drecht, G. & de Vos, M.. 2011. The HYDE 3.1 spatially explicit database of human-induced global land-use change over the past 12,000 years. Global Ecology and Biogeography 20: 7386. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00587.x Google Scholar
Kvamme, K.L. 1992. A predictive site location model on the high plains: an example with an independent test. The Plains Anthropologist 37 (138): 1940.Google Scholar
Lahiri, N. 2011. Revisiting the cultural landscape of Junagadh in the time of the Mauryas. Purātattva 41: 115–30.Google Scholar
Lahiri, N. 2015. Ashoka in ancient India. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Liu, X. 1988. Ancient India and ancient China: trade and religious exchanges AD 1–600. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Menze, B.H. & Ur, J.. 2012. Mapping patterns of long-term settlement in northern Mesopotamia at a large scale. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 109: E778–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1115472109 Google Scholar
Morrison, K.D. & Lycett, M.T.. 1997. Inscriptions as artifacts: precolonial South India and the analysis of texts. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 4: 215–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02428062 Google Scholar
Norman, K.R. 1991. Aśokan inscriptions from Sannati. South Asian Studies 7 (1): 101–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.1991.9628429 Google Scholar
Norman, K.R. 2012. The languages of the composition and transmission of the Aśokan inscriptions, in Olivelle, P., Leoshko, J. & Ray, H.P. (ed.) Reimagining Aśoka: memory and history: 3862. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Olivelle, P., Leoshko, J. & Ray, H.P. (ed.). 2012. Reimagining Aśoka: memory and history. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Paddayya, K. 1996. Modern impacts on archaeological sites in India: a case study from the Shorapur Doab, Karnataka. Man and Environment 21 (2): 7588.Google Scholar
Peterson, C.A. & Drennan, R.D.. 2012. Patterned variation in regional trajectories of community growth, in Smith, M.E. (ed.) The comparative archaeology of complex societies: 88137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Prado, J.L., Arroyo-Cabrales, J., Johnson, E., Alberdi, M.T. & Polaco, O.J.. 2015. New World proboscidean extinctions: comparisons between North and South America. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 7: 277–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12520-012-0094-3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rajan, K. 2008. Situating the beginning of Early Historic times in Tamil Nadu: some issues and reflections. Social Scientist 36: 4078.Google Scholar
Ray, H.P. 1986. Monastery and guild: commerce under the Satavahanas. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ray, H.P. 2012. Archaeology and Aśoka: defining the empire, in Olivelle, P., Leoshko, J. & Ray, H.P. (ed.) Reimagining Aśoka: memory and history: 6592. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Reat, N.R. 1994. Buddhism: a history. Berkeley (CA): Asian Humanities.Google Scholar
Rockman, M. & Steele, J. (ed.). 2003. Colonization of unfamiliar landscapes. London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203422908 Google Scholar
Sahu, N.K. 1984. Kharavela. Bhubaneswar: Government of India Textbook Press.Google Scholar
Selvakumar, V. 2010. The use and relevance of archaeology in the post-modern world: views from India. World Archaeology 42: 468–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2010.498664 Google Scholar
Shaw, J. & Sutcliffe, J.. 2003. Water management, patronage networks and religious change: new evidence from the Sanchi dam complex and counterparts in Gujarat and Sri Lanka. South Asian Studies 19: 73104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2003.9628622 Google Scholar
Singh, U. 2008. A history of ancient and early medieval India. Delhi: Pearson Longman.Google Scholar
Singh, U. 2012. Governing the state and the self: political philosophy and practice in the Edicts of Aśoka. South Asian Studies 28 (2): 131–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2012.725581 Google Scholar
Smith, M.L. 2005. Networks, territories and the cartography of ancient states. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95: 832–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00489.x Google Scholar
Smith, M.L. 2014. Citizen science in archaeology. American Antiquity 79: 749–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.7183/0002-7316.79.4.749749 Google Scholar
Sonakia, A. 1985. Skull cap of an early man from the Narmada Valley alluvium (Pleistocene) of Central India. American Anthropologist 87: 612–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1985.87.3.02a00060 Google Scholar
Stark, B.L. & Garraty, C.P.. 2008. Parallel archaeological and visibility survey in the western lower Papaloapan Basin, Veracruz, Mexico. Journal of Field Archaeology 33: 177–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/009346908791071286 Google Scholar
Subrahmanyam, R. 1964. Salihundam: a Buddhist site in Andhra Pradesh. Hyderabad: Government of Andhra Pradesh.Google Scholar
Sugandhi, N.S. 2008. Between the patterns of history: rethinking Mauryani interaction in the southern Deccan. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago.Google Scholar
Sugandhi, N.S. 2013. Conquests of Dharma: network models and the study of ancient polities, in Osborne, J.F. & Van Vankenburgh, P. (ed.) Territoriality in archaeology (Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 22): 145–63. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association.Google Scholar
Suvrathan, U. 2013. A fragmentary Brahmi inscription from Banavasi. Puratattva 43: 247–51.Google Scholar
Thapar, R. 1997 [1961]. Aśoka and the decline of the Mauryas (with new afterword). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thapar, R. 2004 [2002]. Early India: from the origins to AD 1300. Berkeley: University of California.Google Scholar
Thapar, R. 2006. The Mauryan empire in early India. Historical Research 79: 287305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.2006.00394.x Google Scholar
Thaplyal, K.K.K. 2009. A new Ashokan inscription from Ratanpurwa. Varanasi: Jnana Pravaha.Google Scholar
Watson, A.A. 2011. Predictive modeling of archaeological site location in Cuba. Unpublished MA dissertation, Florida Atlantic University.Google Scholar
Wayman, A. & Rosen, E.. 1990. The rise of Mahayana Buddhism and inscriptional evidence at Nagarjunakonda. Indian Journal of Buddhist Studies 2 (1): 4965.Google Scholar