NSF Grant to Fund Study of Ancient South Asian Trade
Shinu Abraham, associate professor of anthropology, was part of an intercollegiate team of scholars who were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to conduct research into ancient trade and exchange in South Asia and around the Indian Ocean and its relationship to the development of social complexity in the region.
Abraham will receive the grant along with Laure Dussubieux, laboratory scientist and manager of The Field Museum in Chicago, and Thomas Fenn, lecturer at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, for their project, titled “Elemental and Isotopic Characterization of Raw Materials for Ancient Glass from South Asia: Understanding Changing Trade Patterns Around the Indian Ocean.”
According to their proposal, the different industries around the Indian Ocean that fueled the trade had to shifts in the networks connecting the different actors of the trade. Through the study of the glass industry in India, researchers will study how such an industry responded to changes in trade patterns around the Indian Ocean starting around the mid-first millennium BCE to the late Medieval period. At a time when India is witnessing the collapse of its traditional glass industry in favor of a more automated and less labor-intensive alternative, this project will provide new information about the roots of an activity on the brink of extension and will create parallel to understand the consequences of moving industrial landscapes in the modern world.
NSF awarded the archaeologists a three-year grant worth approximately $200,000.
