The Sirens

Eyelids slowly wilt as the soothing hum of the car engine lulls me to sleep. The rising sun casts a golden glow across the endless landscape, with subtle magentas, yellows, and blues fusing together the feathery clouds. Desert grasses and prickly pear cacti blanket the soil, stretching into the distance as far as the eye can see. Idle cows and restless horses dot the countryside, and with The Joshua Tree softly playing in my ears, it feels like heaven.

Sunset in the desert

Yet don’t be fooled by this paradise—by 9:00 a.m., the furious sun scorches anything in its wake. Sizzling temperatures and sandy gusts of wind cause severe dehydration, and it doesn’t help that nearly everything around you is out to destroy you. Dead mesquite branches have a wonderful tendency to find their way through the soles of shoes, prickly pears wind their way into socks, and gravely, sandy soil ensures that the graceless ones among us are constantly wary of our steps. During the day, rattlesnakes and centipedes roam the desert surface like kings, and the same areas transform into the hunting grounds for the coyotes and bobcats at night.

The desert hosts a variety of landforms

This raises the question—why did people settle here? As we continue excavating at the Dinwiddie site, we are getting a firsthand view of how the people who lived in this region before us interacted with the immediate landscape. People made their walls and floors with adobe, a cement-like combination of materials extracted from the ground. They sculpted comals, metates, and manos out of large stones through hours and hours of grinding and pecking. Projectile points flaked out of local Mule Creek obsidian and bone awls and scrapers are scattered throughout our excavation units. Prickly pears produce a delicious fruit, and their pads, de-thorned and cooked, are like green beans. Agave nectar is a natural sweetener, contrasting the savory meats of rabbit, deer, and other wildlife. The Southwest, therefore, stands as a prime example of the resourcefulness and ingenuity of humanity.

Ultimately, there is a certain misconception of the desert. The harsh, arid climate complements the stunning beauty of the landscape. It isn’t just a drab, sandy stretch of land that houses rolling tumbleweeds and tough men galloping on horses. Instead, it is a remarkable feat of nature—dynamic skies, resilient fauna, and hardened creatures inhabiting the landscape. The people who resided in these lands managed to harness the staggering power of the desert to its fullest, stamping their mark into the dirt for centuries. And some teenage rascal from Bangalore is privileged enough to be able to relive some of the experiences that these people had, interacting with the gorgeous landscape just like they did.

Field school students learning tool-making techniques used by the people who lived in this area in the past

Written as part of the Archaeology Southwest Field School 2015 - link here

The Silent Cartographer

A few months back, I was assigned a project to analyze a few maps from a city of choice and come to some conclusions. Naturally, I chose Bangalore because apart from it being the city I was most familiar with, I was positive that there were so few maps of it online, appealing to the hereditary laziness in me. After a frustrating few hours of perusing the deepest depths of the internet, I managed to pick out a few maps from different time periods, each with fairly credible sources.

Alright, now all I have to do is look at the legends, make some vague connections between them, and I'm good to go. Those little green puffs in the 1791 map? Trees, or something. Hey, look! Those green things are gone in the Google Maps version - boom. Urbanization causes deforestation. Blame it on colonialism.

Uhh... those large roads in the center of the city? Now they are the major arteries of the cities, with smaller capillaries branching out into a million different households. Population influx, growth of IT, easy! Again, let me just blame that on colonialism.

This is pretty easy! It's just like a vague connect-the-dots puzzle, but one that traverses space and time. Let's move on to the next-

Hold on. What is that? Is that... the fort? Bangalore Fort? The whole map of Bangalore is simply "Bangalore Fort" in the 1791 version, but in 1914 it's just this tiny little oval perched on the left side of the page. It's not even present in the 1956 map! And the center of Bangalore in Google Maps is far off from Bangalore Fort. Now, it gets interesting. I need to dig deeper, figure out why the most prominent and arguably only element in the city is minimized to this tiny, insignificant dot. Let's analyze the map data with relation to the Bangalorean and - on a larger scale - Indian timeline.

1791: Bangalore is a British establishment, maintained and run by the army. The fort, captured earlier that year, has been taken from the hands of Tipu Sultan, the King of Mysore. Killed in battle, his legacy is being written off by the foreigners just like they did to countless people, victims, and stories before, across every continent. Bengaluru is changed to Bangalore, and words such as "cantonment" and "park" are being introduced into the lexicon. All traces of India are being wiped away, replaced with the crimson cross and the promise of democracy.

Bangalore Fort, 1791
Earl Cornwallis

1914: Unbeknownst to much of the outside world, India has been in revolution for decades. Riots have been extinguished as quickly as a candle, but underground armies refuse to back down. Violence is only one means of revolt - the effective protesters are the ones we never see or hear because they've penetrated the defenses so subtly that even the British have no idea what has struck them. The silent cartographer, in a constant war with history, attempts to reverse the damage that the invaders have done. Bangalore as a city has expanded, but in reality, the focus of the city still surrounds the walls of the fort. The silent cartographer sees this, and slowly, measuredly draws the attention away. First, the structure becomes smaller - because it's all relative. The size of the paper stays the same, the size of the fort stays the same, but the size of the city grows; the building that was 1/3rd of the page is now 1/6th. Then, he ever so slightly changes the perspective: each year, the fort moves half a square to the left. Just enough to be noticeable, not enough to arouse suspicion. Who bothers studying maps, anyway?

Bangalore, 1914
Verlag von Karl Baedeker

1956: Freedom. The British are gone from our lives, never to return. Gandhi was just the end - the last straw on the camel's back. Plans have been in motion for nearly a century, and it shows: Bangalore Fort? Vanished. Mirrors and smoke. Just like that, it's gone.

Bangalore, 1956
Satyaprakash & Co.

How does it matter? Just because the fort is gone from the map, doesn't mean it has actually vanished. Like the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, and the Great Wall of China, it too has stood the test of time. History can't be overwritten if the physical structure still remains! Unfortunately for the colonists, it can. Ask any Bangalorean the directions to the fort, and nine times out of ten you'll get the response, "What fort?". Gothilla, saar.

The systematic process of colonization was the driving force behind the erasure of culture and context from the world. It devastated millions of lives, dehumanized the rest, and injected countries with enough large-scale problems to last centuries. Yes, it was terrible. But it is equally important to acknowledge those that quietly, subtly stood up to it. They were the ones who managed to start the process of decolonization while colonization was still happening, right under the noses of the British.

What started off as a pretty mundane project turned out to be arguably the most captivating work I've done so far. I was reading literature I had never in a thousand years imagined I would pick up. The homework had turned into a game - I was playing the detective and the clues were scattered across time. While this is neither groundbreaking, phenomenal, or even close to admirable, the passion I felt completing it is something I haven't felt for years. High school had almost completely dissolved any interest I felt towards history and archaeology, and I'm extremely glad to be out of there. I think my fascination with archaeology is not the artifacts, the mummies, the buildings - it's the prospect that I can play a time-traveling Sherlock Holmes who isn't afraid to pick up a shovel just to find some answers.