Contents: Acknowledgements. I. Making South India: landscape histories: 1. The time and space of landscape history. 2. The making of South India. 3. Research methods. 4. Organization of the work. II. Beyond the local: The Daroji Valley in time: 1. The structure of the long run: land and climate. 2. Regional settlement dynamics: an overview. 3. The Vijayanagara period: locality, city, empire. III. Roles and meanings of some South Indian places: 1. The Daroji Valley: a landscape in history. 2. Some South Indian places. 3. Discussion. IV. Vijayanagara reservoirs: form, function and meaning: 1. Reservoirs in South Asia. 2. Reservoirs as physical features: form and operation. 3. Integration with other facilities: reservoirs as elements in an agricultural landscape. 4. Reservoirs as monuments. 5. Reservoirs as temples. V. The western Daroji Valley: 1. Settlement and land use in the western valley. 2. Vijayanagara occupation in the western valley. VI. The main valley: west: 1. The main valley united and divided. 2. Settlement and land use in the western section of the main valley. 3. Discussion: the western part of the main valley. VII. The main valley: east: 1. Settlement and land use in the eastern part of the main valley. 2. Discussion: the main valley. VIII. The Avinamodugu Valley: 1. The Avinamodugu Valley prior to AD 1300. 2. The Avinamodugu Valley after AD 1300. 3. Discussion: the Avinamodugu Valley. IX. Making places: a long-term view: 1. Landscape histories: time in place. 2. The Daroji Valley. 3. The Avinamodugu Valley. 4. Beyond the valley: irrigation, power and risk. 5. Discussion. References cited.
"Landscape history begins with the recognition that both past human experiences and archaeological research are fundamentally focused on specific locales. Locations are defined and made meaningful through processes of place-making, cultural processes that may be multiple and contested but which are never fully divorced from material conditions. Although both scholars and residents of particular places make constant temporal inferences (among others) about settlements, structures, and features, all historical arguments are in fact made on the basis of unified, contemporaneous material (or textual) landscapes in which diverse features jostle together 'out of time'.
It is argued here that traditional time-dissected analyses of long-term histories need to be combined with more unified studies of place in which landscape elements made at one time continue to be used, re-made, remembered, and perhaps forgotten. To this end, this volume identifies several South Indian 'kinds of places' such as ashmounds, megaliths, inscriptions, hero stones, temples, and reservoirs which played complex and changing roles in the long-term history of one South Indian place, the Daroji Valley.
Located in Northern Karnataka, this valley served as a corridor of movement during the Southern Neolithic, an iron-smelting locale in the early historic, and most dramatically, as an area of food production for the imperial city of Vijayanagara, especially in the sixteenth century. Home to one of Southern India's most famous chains of runoff-fed reservoirs, this study examines the ways in which the Daroji Valley interacted with larger worlds through time, and explores how and why the dramatic agrarian expansion of the Vijayanagara period led to devastating environment consequences." (jacket)
