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9 results

  • Dietary Variability in the Varna Chalcolithic Cemeteries

  • Bisserka Gaydarska, Joe Roe, Vladimir Slavchev
  • Journal:
    European Journal of Archaeology , First View
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 September 2024, pp. 1-19
    • Article
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  • This article presents the results of AMS radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and FRUITS dietary modelling to investigate dietary variability among sixty individuals buried at Varna in the mid-fifth millennium bc. The principal pattern was the isotopic clustering of some forty-three per cent of the population, which suggests a ‘Varna core diet’, with the remainder showing a wider variety of isotopic profiles. While there is a slight trend for heightened meat and fish consumption among male individuals compared to female and undetermined individuals, the authors found no clear correlation between dietary variation and the well-attested differentiation in material culture in the graves. Three children had isotopic profile and estimated diets unmatched by any of the adults in the sample. Two scenarios, dubbed ‘regional’ and ‘local’, are presented to explain such dietary variability at Varna.

  • 12 - Dignity and Status in Ancient and Medieval India

  • Edited by Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
  • Book:
    Human Dignity in Asia
    Published online:
    26 July 2022
    Print publication:
    15 September 2022, pp 285-307

  • Summary

    Ancient and medieval India (prior to ca. 1600) produced a vast literature dealing with the nature of the human being, the proper ordering of society, and ethical and legal norms. Sanskrit sources tend to emphasize special dignities belonging to particular statuses according to a divinely ordained class hierarchy (varṇa-dharma). But in some contexts we hear of universally shared aspects of the human condition. Ascetic and devotional movements call into question special dignities tied to ascriptive rank. Sanskrit texts on good governance formulate general standards of justice and equity that could cut across or bypass rank. Thus, Hindu sources illustrate how ethical and legal orders find ways to compartmentalize: to recognize that all people can share basic capacities does not automatically sweep the field clear of status dignity. This essay draws on Jeremy Waldron’s concept of human dignity as a status claim that “levels up” by attributing to all people a dignity once reserved for a privileged few. We note Hindu examples of a similar approach, as well as examples of “leveling down” by pointing out the hypocrisy of elites while extolling the virtues of which the lowly are capable.

  • The social context of the emergence, development and abandonment of the Varna cemetery, Bulgaria

  • John Chapman, Tom Higham, Vladimir Slavchev, Bisserka Gaydarska, Noah Honch
  • Journal:
    European Journal of Archaeology / Volume 9 / Issue 2-3 / 2006
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    25 January 2017, pp. 159-183
    Print publication:
    2006

  • In this article we outline some of the key characteristics of the social structure of the Climax Copper Age in the eastern Balkans and the contributions of the Varna cemetery to those developments. We continue by examining the implications of the new series of 21 AMS dates from the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, which represent the first dates for the Varna Eneolithic cemetery on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. Representing the first phase of the AMS dating project for the Varna I cemetery, these dates have been selected to provide a range of different grave locations, ranges of grave goods, and age/gender associations. We conclude by addressing the question of the unexpectedly early start of the cemetery, as well as its apparently short duration and relatively rapid demise.

  • 2 - The ‘Brahman Raj’: kings and service people c. 1700–1830

  • Susan Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    15 July 1999, pp 64-96

  • Summary

    This chapter explores which brought ideals of Brahmanical rank to the fore in Indian life, without ever fully supplanting the ideals of the lordly man of prowess. It also explores why the Brahman's and merchant's ideal of a 'pure' dharmic way of life became so influential in the world of the so called caste 'Hindu'. In middle of the eighteenth century there were three main areas of advancement in which Brahmans and Brahman-centred values came increasingly to predominate: in the field of finance, statecraft and war, and ritual arena. In the peshwa daftar records, that is, the Maratha rulers' registers of state transactions and revenue obligations, the Peshwas documented acts of adjudication through which they as Brahman guardians of the realm proclaimed themselves arbiters of other people's jati and varna status. India's dynasts built their power through a drive for cash revenue. The techniques used to spread and tax commercial cash-crop production prefigured the strategies of Britain's colonial revenue machine.

  • 8 - Caste in the everyday life of independent India

  • Susan Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    15 July 1999, pp 306-341

  • Summary

    This chapter concerns caste consciousness as it has been manifested in surprising though generally uncontentious forms, most notably where one can see conventions of jati and varna difference retaining their power in the modern workplace and in the thinking of educated city-dwellers. Since the 1950s, cross-cutting affinities of faith, class and ethno-linguistic identity have often had a more direct and lasting impact on both local and national life than the claims of anti-Brahmanism, or Harijan uplift, or caste reform movements. The chapter examines why caste has come to operate for so many Indians in the manner of an imagined community, that is, as a bond of idealised allegiance answering needs which both in India and elsewhere have been more widely associated with the claims of two other forms of supra-local attachment, the modern nation and the ethno-religious community. In the years after Independence, social scientists found further evidence of the spread of these modern-minded or substantialised forms of caste consciousness.

  • 3 - Western ‘orientalists’ and the colonial perception of caste

  • Susan Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    15 July 1999, pp 97-143

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the understandings of caste propounded by Western orientalists from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, the massive bureaucratic machinery of the Raj had generated an enormous output of documentations in which jati and varna were used as basic units of identification. Two key themes have been identified in the vast array of regional ethnographic surveys, population censuses and other official and quasi-official writing. The first is an insistence on the supposedly ineradicable sense of community dividing Hindus from Muslims and other non-Hindus. The second is a view of Indians, apart from so-called tribals and followers of minority faiths, as slaves to rigid, Brahman-centred caste values. As of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'Aryan' caste Hindus were widely said by both Indian and British race theorists to be 'awaking' in evolutionary terms.

  • 9 - ‘Caste wars’ and the mandate of violence

  • Susan Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    15 July 1999, pp 342-364

  • Summary

    This chapter focuses on one of the two manifestations of caste consciousness, the phenomenon of so called 'caste war'. It explores how caste can divide modern Indians to the point of systematic armed violence between those of high- and low-caste origin. It is true that those involved in 'caste wars' since the 1960s have generally mixed the language of jati and varna with references to faith, class and nationality, defining themselves and their opponents not just as embodiments of caste-based `community', but as landlords and tenants, capitalists and workers, oppressors and oppressed. Since the 1970s the ideals of the `secular' nation-state have been regularly inverted by groups claiming to be under threat from the real or imagined aggression of militant `Dalits'. In many of the widely reported conflicts, `caste war' violence has tended to feed back and forth between urban centres and the rural hinterlands from which towns like Banaras and Aurangabad draw many of their students and factory workers.

  • 4 - Caste and the modern nation: incubus or essence?

  • Susan Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    15 July 1999, pp 144-186

  • Summary

    This chapter explores the views aired in the subcontinent's emerging public arena, looking briefly at the early nineteenth century, but concentrating primarily on from the 1870s to the early 1930s. It examines why many Indian polemicists identified caste as a topic of vital concern for the modern nation, and seeks to identify the conceptual roots of the caste debates, as well as their intellectual and ideological consequences. The chapter also explores the ideas of the many Indians who made their mark in controversies about the spiritual and political meanings of caste. It discusses the conventional Hindu ideas about the low and unclean nature of 'untouchables'. Since the First World War, jati and varna were being so widely identified as expressions of Aryan/Hindu 'race genius', many theorists sought to distinguish between supposedly good and bad manifestations of 'caste spirit', and exalted the idealised solidarities of the twice-born as the embodiment of national faith and a cohesive national morality.