Ajay Pratap (Banaras Hindu University; apratap_2002@yahoo.com)

The purpose of this session is to take stock of theoretical issues in Indian archaeology. Indian archaeology has come a long-way, since the 18th century, when those such as William Jones, James Prinsep and Charles Wilkins, initiated the Asiatic Society of Bengal. It was the founding of this society that spurred greatly the discovery of the past of a nascently colonized nation. Many studies now exist about this period (Singh, 2004) apart from the literature actually emanating from this Society's Journal - The Journal of The Asiatic Society of Bengal. In addition, The Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Asiatic Researches, The Journal of The Royal Society and The Calcutta Annual Register are some of the Journals that contain the Oriental Scholarship relevant to Ancient India and its archaeology. We would invite contributions that critically examine the growth of archaeology through this early period and the first formulations in India of the surveys, findings, and methods of excavation closer to the decades preceding independence. We also invite contributions that would look critically at the growth of archaeological method and theory in India in the post-Independence era. These would include theories of culture, contact-diffusion models used widely to explain similarity and differences in archaeological cultures, the establishment of the New Archaeological method, as the most dominant method, in modern archaeology, in India,for nearly half a century now. We also wish to include a discussion of the impact of postprocessual archaeology on Indian archaeology.