Cartographies of warfare in the Indian subcontinent: Contextualizing archaeological and historical analysis through big data approaches

Abstract

Some of the most notable human behavioral palimpsests result from warfare and its durable traces in the form of defensive architecture and strategic infrastructure. For premodern periods, this architecture is often understudied at the large scale, resulting in a lack of appreciation for the enormity of the costs and impacts of military spending over the course of human history. In this article, we compare the information gleaned from the study of the fortified cities of the Early Historic period of the Indian subcontinent (c. 3rd century BCE to 4th century CE) with the precolonial medieval era (9-17th centuries CE). Utilizing in-depth archaeological and historical studies along with local sightings and citizen-science blogs to create a comprehensive data set and map series in a “big-data” approach that makes use of heterogeneous data sets and presence-absence criteria, we discuss how the architecture of warfare shifted from an emphasis on urban defense in the Early Historic period to an emphasis on territorial offense and defense in the medieval period. Many medieval fortifications are known from only local reports and have minimal identifying information but can still be studied in the aggregate using a least-shared denominator approach to quantification and mapping.