Between History and Anthropology: Finding a New Home for Archaeology

This essay is dedicated to Romila Thapar, who recently turned ninety. As I was writing this article, I recalled my struggle in the initial years of my doctoral research to frame questions for a project centred on text-aided archaeology, one that I ultimately decided to abandon and instead shift to settlement archaeology based entirely on archaeological data. It was the extensive conversations that I had with her then that eventually set me thinking about the relationship between history and archaeology. These ideas and thoughts have also emerged based on the lived experience of my own location in a history department, first as a student and then as a member of the faculty.