Dr. Carla Sinopoli, newly appointed Director of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, will present her talk  Long Histories in a Small Region: Documenting 3,000 Years of Social and Political Change Along the Tugabhadra River in Southern Indiaon March 7, 2019 in Hibben 105.  The talk will be followed by a "Meet the Director" reception in the Hibben Atrium at 5:30 pm.

Abstract:

The central Tungabhadra River Valley—one of the most inhospitable regions of southern India— seems an unlikely place to have been a center of innovation and cultural creativity. Nonetheless, from the South Indian Neolithic, through the South Indian Iron Age and the emergence of South India’s largest and last precolonial empire, the inhabitants of the Tungabhadra River Valley domesticated new plant species, invented new technologies, and built one of the world’s larg-est precolonial cities.  Drawing on her more than 30 years of archaeo-logical fieldwork, Sinopoli introduces the Tungabhadra sequence and places it in the larger context of South Asian archaeology.

Carla Sinopoli earned her BA at SUNY Binghamton and MA and PhD at the University of Michigan.  She came to UNM in October 2018, after 25 years as a Professor and Curator in the Department and Museum of Anthropology in the University of Michigan. Sinopoli has conducted archaeological research in Southern India since 1983, as a member of the Vijayanagara Research Project (1983-1986), co-director of the Vijay-anagara Metropolitan Survey (1988-1998) and co-director of the Early Historic Landscapes of the Tungabhadra Corridor (EHLTC) project.