Archaeology

Field Archaeology

Field archaeology is the set of methods used to find, record and recover archaeological evidence in the landscape. It begins before a trench is opened: map reading, walk-over survey, surface collection protocols, and a research design that states what question is being asked and what will be left unexcavated.

In the Indian context, field teams work across plough-soil scatters, mounds, rock shelters, urban historic cores, coastal sites and forested landscapes. Each setting demands a different balance of speed, sampling and conservation. The first duty is to create a record that another scholar can understand a generation later.

A field programme should specify grid systems, recording sheets, photography standards, finds processing, and the chain of custody from trench to store. IIACH training pages treat these as core professional habits rather than optional extras.

Excavation

Excavation is a destructive experiment. Once a deposit is removed, it cannot be put back. For that reason excavation is justified only by a clear question, adequate recording, and a conservation plan for what will be exposed.

Single-context and stratigraphic excavation, baulk recording, and open-area methods are taught as complementary tools. Students learn to distinguish cut, fill, interface and construction; to draw sections that match the written context; and to bag, label and photograph before an object leaves the square.

Training excavations described on this portal are conceptual. No site is named as an IIACH project unless a verified permit and report exist.

Archaeological Survey

Survey locates and characterises sites and off-site scatters without necessarily excavating them. Methods include systematic fieldwalking, shovel testing where legally and ethically appropriate, monument inspection, and the integration of legacy maps and satellite imagery.

A survey record should capture location quality, land use, threat, visible features, and a statement of uncertainty. Density maps without metadata are not scholarship.

IIACH treats survey as equal in dignity to excavation. Many of India’s most urgent heritage questions — landscape change, site destruction, irrigation history — are survey problems.

Stratigraphy

Stratigraphy is the grammar of archaeological time. Harris-matrix thinking, interface recognition and the refusal to mix contexts are the difference between a dated sequence and a bag of mixed finds.

Students are asked to explain every relationship: which deposit is later, which cut removes what, which wall is bonded or butted. Section drawings are evidence, not decoration.

Where absolute dates exist (radiocarbon, luminescence, inscriptions, coins in sealed contexts), they are hung on the stratigraphic sequence, not used to overwrite it.

Archaeological Science

Archaeological science applies laboratory and quantitative methods to archaeological questions: dating, materials characterisation, residue analysis, isotopes, ancient DNA where legally and ethically permitted, and statistical modelling of assemblages.

Science does not replace field craft. A perfectly analysed sherd from an unrecorded context answers a weaker question than a modest analysis from a sealed floor.

IIACH pages describe methods and literature pathways. They do not publish fabricated laboratory certificates or invented dates.

Bioarchaeology

Bioarchaeology studies human remains and, more broadly, the biological traces of past lives. In India this work is governed by law, ethics and community sensitivity. Display and sampling decisions are never casual.

Training emphasises respectful recovery, basic osteological recording, and the principle that research questions must justify any invasive analysis.

No human-remain images that could be sensational or identifiable are used on this website.

Environmental Archaeology

Seeds, charcoal, phytoliths, pollen, soils and animal bone reconstruct diet, fuel, climate and land use. Environmental sampling must be designed in the trench, not improvised at the finds table.

Indian Holocene landscapes — floodplains, coasts, uplands, drylands — each leave different preservation biases. Interpretation states those biases.

Environmental archaeology is also a conservation tool: it explains why a monument’s setting is part of its significance.

Underwater Archaeology

Rivers, tanks, harbours and coastal waters hold wrecks, drowned settlements and votive deposits. Work requires specialised safety, law of the sea and inland-water permissions, and conservation of waterlogged materials.

IIACH describes the field for education. It does not claim a dive programme or a recovered cargo.

Landscape Archaeology

Landscape archaeology studies how people organised space: fields, routes, sacred geographies, water systems and the views that monuments were meant to command.

Methods include historic map regression, GIS, walking transect, oral history and the reading of field boundaries. The unit of analysis is often larger than a ‘site’.

This approach is essential in India, where living villages, pilgrimage routes and protected monuments frequently occupy the same terrain.

Experimental Archaeology

Experiment tests how things were made and used: firing a kiln, knapping stone, building a mud wall, cooking in a replica vessel. Results are models, not proofs of a single past.

IIACH would host experiments as teaching devices with full recording, not as tourist spectacle.

Archaeological Documentation

Documentation includes context sheets, registers, drawings, photography, 3D models, databases and the report. A project that cannot produce an archive has not finished its excavation.

Standards cover file naming, colour management, scale, north arrows, and the distinction between observation and interpretation on every sheet.

Digital files are stored with checksums and metadata. Paper remains a valid preservation medium.

Remote Sensing

Satellite imagery, aerial photography and, where authorised, drone mapping help detect cropmarks, soilmarks and topographic features. Remote sensing is a hypothesis generator; ground truth remains essential.

Legal restrictions on flying and on some imagery products are respected. No restricted data are hosted on this portal.

GIS & Spatial Archaeology

Geographic information systems integrate survey points, excavation grids, historic maps and environmental layers. Spatial archaeology asks how distance, visibility and resources structured past decisions.

Students learn coordinate systems used in India, metadata, and the danger of precision without accuracy. A beautiful map with a wrong datum is a wrong map.