International Conference on the Rise of Civilization in the Greater Indus Valley and Saraswati: Recent Interpretations California State University, Long Beach Saturday, October 18, 2003 Distinguished Foreign Speakers: Ihsan Ali, University of Peshawar, Pakistan, is a distinguished archaeologist with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, U.K. Professor (Dr.) Ali is Director, Archaeology and Museums, Government of Northwest Frontier Province, Pakistan. He recently toured American universities as a distinguished lecturer in archaeology chosen by the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. His special interests are in the archaeology of the Peshawar Valley. B.B. Lal was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972, when he then joined Jiwaji University, Gwalior, and subsequently served as Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla. Lal joined the Archaeological Survey in January 1946, and held charge of the Excavations Branch and participated with Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavations at Harappa. He has held distinguished visiting appointments in the United States and Russia, and has served as President of the World Archaeological Congress and various UNESCO committees. Lal has a large number of excavations to his credit in India and abroad, including archaeological fieldwork in Egypt. These cover a very wide range, from the Palaeolithic times to the early historical. His publications are many and varied, appearing in scientific journals around the world. His latest books are The Earliest Civilization of South Asia (1997) and India 1947-1997: New Light on the Indus Civilization (1998). For his exceptional achievements and service in the fields of archaeology and science, Lal was awarded the PADMA BHUSHAN by the Government of India in January, 2000. Iravatham Mahadevan, University of Chennai, is a leading Indian expert on the Indus Valley script and one of the world's foremost scholars in the field. His computer-aided study, The Indus Valley Script: Texts, Concordances and Tables (Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, 1977), is recognized internationally as a major source-book for research in the Indus script. Mahadevan has also written extensively on the Tamil-Brahmi script and developed a method to read the earliest Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions, and has published the Corpus of the Tamil-Brahmi Inscriptions (1966). His latest volume, Early Tamil Epigraphy, appears in the Harvard Oriental Series (2003). Shereen Ratnagar, Centre for Historical Research, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is one of India's leading archaeologists investigating the factors contributing to the end of Indus Valley Civilization. A pioneer among women working in ancient South Asian archaeology, Ratnagar has investigated the social, political and religious reasons for the demise of Harappan culture. This was the topic of her prestigious delivery of the Heras Memorial Lectures 1988), for the Heras Institute of History and Culture (Mumbai). Vasant S. Shinde, Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, Pune, India, is one of India's top specialists in Indian Protohistory and Harappan (Indus) Civilization. He has supervised numerous excavations and discovered over fifty new sites. Featured Speakers: Shiva G. Bajpai, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Northridge, is a graduate of Banaras Hindu University and received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. His publications include a number of articles on ancient Indian history and culture, and he co-authored The Historical Atlas of South Asia, ($1.4 million dollar project at that time) published by the University of Chicago Press in 1978. Bajpai's current research is focused on the geopolitics of Ancient India, including issues related to India's early Vedic civilization. Steve Farmer is a comparative historian who specializes in studies of the interaction of neurobiology, literate technologies, and culture. He holds his Ph.D. from Stanford University and is a past Harvard University Research Fellow and Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has taught at George Mason University and Louisiana State University, and has lectured extensively in the United States and Europe. His book Syncretism in the West (1999) develops a general model of the co-evolution of manuscript traditions and premodern religious and philosophical systems. Theoretical predictions of that model led to the first questioning of the traditional 'Indus script' thesis in the late 1990s. Current work on the Indus symbols is being conducted in collaboration with the Indologist Michael Witzel (Harvard University) and the computational linguist Richard Sproat (AT&T Shannon Labs and the University of Illinois). For recent papers and lecture notes of Farmer's pertinent to the Indus symbol problem, see http://www.safarmer.com/downloads. Bradley K. Hawkins, Religious Studies, California State University, Long Beach, is the author of four books and many articles on ancient South and Southeast Asian religions (his latest is An Introduction to Asian Religions). Fluent in seven languages, including Sanskrit and Pali, Hawkins is a former student of A.L. Basham and Ninian Smart. He has taught at UCSB, UCR and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Sierre Leone, and has been working on the socio-religious dimensions of Indus script controversy. Brian Hemphill, California State University, Bakersfield, is a biological anthropologist and specialist in human variation, Genetics of prehistoric inhabitants of India and Central Asia, and Great Basin Bioarchaeology. He works on skeletal and dental indicators of behavior and genetic interaction of prehistoric and living inhabitants of Central and South Asia. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, University of Wisconsin, teaches archaeology and ancient technology in Madison. He has worked extensively in the Indus Valley, in Northern India and Pakistan, and since 1986, he has been the Co-Director and Field Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project in Pakistan. His has published extensively on Ancient South Asia and his work has been published in National Geographic Magazine and on the seminal website for teachers, www.harappa.com. He has conducted numerous teacher workshops and training sessions on the archaeology of South Asia, and has developed teacher lesson-plans for use in the classroom. Randall Law, University of Wisconsin-Madison. A Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, Mr. Law is investigating inter-regional interaction, exchange systems, and the emergence of urban society in the Indus Valley. Supported the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and Fulbright Foundation, he traveled extensively throughout Pakistan and western India identifying and sampling the potential sources of rock and mineral commodities traded during the Indus Period. Currently supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he is conducting broad-scale geochemical analyses of rock and mineral artifacts excavated at the Indus urban center of Harappa in order to match those materials to sources in Baluchistan, Sindh, N.W.F.P., Punjab, Jammu, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Richard H. Meadow, Harvard University, is Director of the Zooarchaeology Laboratory at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. A Senior Lecturer on Anthropology, he is Co-Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project. He has carried out analysis of faunal remains throughout South and Southwest Asia and is a founding member of the International Council of Archaeozoology. He is a member of many national and international professional organizations. Heather M.-L. Miller, Anthropology Department, University of Toronto, has research interests in the impressive high-temperature technologies of the Indus peoples, particularly manufacturing sites at the ancient city of Harappa. Dr. Miller continues to work on the technological virtuosity of the Indus craftspeople, and the roles their objects played in the Indus economy and society. She is also beginning a project with the University of Peshawar and others to investigate the historic period caravanserai (rest stations) dotting the trade and pilgrimage routes between South and Central Asia. She has been a Research Associate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, since her term as the Cotsen Visiting Fellow in 2001-2002. (http://www.erin.utoronto.ca/~w3hmlmil/) Ajita Patel, Harvard University, an advanced graduate student at Harvard University, has done extensive archaeological work in Indus Valley sites and co-authored, with Richard Meadow, an important paper of the authenticity of 'horse' seals in the Indus Valley. She has also investigated and published work on pre-historic pastoralism in North-West South Asia, and on the archaeozoology of the early to late Harappan era. Gregory L. Possehl, University of Pennsylvania, is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator in Charge, Asian Section, University of Pennsylvania Museum (www.sas.upenn.edu/~gpossehl/) He is an expert on food production, urbanization and settlement patters in Ancient South Asia. Possehl, a senior scholar in the field, has produced numerous Ph.D.'s and is currently excavating Gilund, the largest of the Ahar-Banas Complex sites on the eastern frontier of the Indus Civilization (http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/research/possehl/ahar-banas.shtml) Damodar R. SarDesai, Professor Emeritus of History, UCLA, was the first holder of the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Pre-Modern Indian History. A former Department Chair and Chair of South and Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA, SarDesai also directed the University of California's Education Abroad Program in New Delhi. He also served as the President of the (Formerly Royal) Asiatic Society of Bombay from 1989-1999. SarDesai is widely published in both South and Southeast Asia studies, and under his leadership, the Doshi Chair hosted a number of successful international conferences on India-themes, including an international conference on "The Development of Indology and Comparative Philology in Germany, 1750-1950" (in press). Steven Weber, Washington State University, material culture and subsistence systems in ancient South Asia. He co-founded the Journal of Ethnobiology and the Society for Ethnobiology to promote the interdisciplinary study of human interaction with the natural environment. He has a special interest in Paleoethnobotany and the Indus Civilization. Rita Wright, NYU, since 1975, has been conducting research in one of the most archaeologically rich areas of the world, first as a field hand on survey, then on excavations in the Near East (Afghanistan and Iran) and currently in South Asia (Pakistan). She is Assistant Director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project and Director of the Beas Valley Regional Survey . Her research has consistently focused on the development of complex societies, urbanism and states and the negotiation of power relations as they are manifest on the local level (gender, class, ethnicity, age) and regional and inter-regional levels (technology, social boundaries, trade and exchange). The work is broadly comparative and incorporates theoretical elements from Marxism, political economies and feminist archaeology; methodologically, it includes materials analysis, especially of ceramics, and landscape studies. Interests include urbanism; state formation; gender relations; the ancient Near East, Egypt and South Asia. Collaborating Institutions and Units: California State University, Long Beach College of Liberal Arts Department of Asian and Asian American History Department of History Department of Religious Studies Department of Anthropology Office of University Development Institute for Integrated Research in Materials, Environments and Society Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies South Asia Committee, Center for International Education Center for International Education University Programs, Odyssey 2003 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Loyola Marymount University University of California, Irvine (UCI) Southern California Conference for International Studies (South Asia Seminar) UCLA, Department of History, Doshi Chair in Premodern India Western Conference, Association for Asian Studies Council of Conferences, Assocation for Asian Studies George Iny Enterprises The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth Last updated September 21, 2000