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02/28 Shinu Anna Abraham (St. Lawrence University): "Materializing Motion Across Maritime Spaces: Indian Ocean Glass Beads in the First Millennia BCE/CE"

Friday, 28 February 2020 - 6:00 PM
Penn Museum Widener Lecture Hall, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Abraham’s keynote lecture for the 12th Annual CAS Graduate Conference - "Movement, Mobility, and the Journey: Ancient Actions and Perspectives”
The Indian Ocean region is considered a coherent analytical unit of study because of the complex maritime-based networks that have bound its widespread communities for millennia. Research on these connections is longstanding, but has intensified in recent decades, with scholarship emerging from an array of disciplines. For archaeologists, the far-flung connections are made tangible in the movements of cultural elements – objects, ideas, people, etc. – and the material traces they leave behind. One such material category are the glass beads of South Asia: starting in the mid-1st millennium BCE, South Asia produced huge quantities of small drawn beads that were distributed locally, across the western and eastern Indian Ocean littorals, and even beyond to sites in western Europe and Japan. New data from recent excavations, surveys, and materials science studies are beginning to demonstrate how these glass beads can serve as viable proxies, not only for tracking movements across this maritime expanse, but also for reconstructing the social contexts in which these movements occurred.