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Front Cover

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The Archaeology of Modern Worlds in the Indian Ocean

Authors:Mark William Hauser, Julia Jong Haines (editors)
ISBN:9789395474337
Binding:Hardcover
Year:2026
Pages:270 with numerous b/w illustrations
Size:16 x 24 x 2 cm
Weight:565 grams
Price:INR19951796.00
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About the Book
Case studies that show the importance of the Indian Ocean region to the emergence of modernity and globalization.

This volume brings together a diverse range of specialists working in multiple areas of the Indian Ocean world, providing broad geographical coverage and comparisons across sites. Contributors use a historical archaeological approach, which bridges everyday life in the recent past with large-scale processes of globalization, to examine topics related to colonialism, labor, race, ethnicity, diaspora, human-environment relationships, and heritage.

Case studies from Zanzibar, Mauritius and the Mascarene islands, India, Indonesia, Java, and other locations emphasize networks and connections across the Indian Ocean. Contributors apply a variety of disciplinary methods, including bioanthropology, analysis of medieval illustrations and colonial documents, architectural history, and anthropology of built space. They discuss the material history of domestic areas, religious structures, and colonial outposts; the structure of the slave trade; and the everyday implications of disease and health management within laboring populations.

This volume decenters European narratives and actors to show the important ways this region shaped the modern world. By highlighting the experiences of ordinary people in East Africa and South and Southeast Asia, the research in these chapters contributes to a better understanding of histories in the Global South over the last four hundred years.
About the Authors
Mark William Hauser

Mark William Hauser, professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, is coeditor of Archaeology in Dominica: Everyday Ecologies and Economies at Morne Patate.
Julia Jong Haines

Julia Jong Haines is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Society for the Humanities and Department of Anthropology at Cornell University.
Editorial Reviews



“…an exciting new addition to this body of scholarship … [it] will be of great interest to not just students and scholars of Hindu traditions, but students and scholars of Sanskrit literature, students and scholars of mythology, and students and scholars of gender and religion as well.”
Religious Studies Review
The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya sets new standards in the examination of religious literary figures in South Asian textual traditions and is an exemplar of how philological and literary analysis should evolve to better accommodate the cultural investments of original literary communities. This study comes as a pertinent and much-needed reminder that even as historical facticity may not be a primary concern of literary characterizations, literary characterizations are indeed a historical fact in themselves.”
Religions of South Asia
“…a valuable resource for readers of the Upaniṣads, post-Vedic Brahminical mythology, and Sanskrit literature more broadly … this title will no doubt become a benchmark work within Vedic studies, and will additionally inspire with its example a much wider audience of scholars engaging Hindu mythology.”
Reading Religion
“Lindquist traces the textual references to Yājñavalkya from their pre-Buddhist beginnings to their classical and postclassical contexts, all while avoiding the pitfalls of mostly pointless inquiries into the 'historicity' of Yājñavalkya. As such, the book is unique within the field of Indology because it goes beyond the usual dismissive descriptions of such personalities as mere eponyms or arbitrary placeholders for sagely authority. In contrast, Lindquist shows how coherent features of thought and rhetorical style provided a solid core text-persona called Yājñavalkya, around whom a host of distinctive ideas and styles of debate and expression were carried through several genres of Vedic and classical Hindu sacred writing.”
—Donald R. Davis Jr., University of Texas at Austin
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