Anthropology Colloquium Series lecture by Dr. Sinopoli

Please join the Anthropology Department on Thursday, March 7 in Hibben 105 at 3:30pm for our Anthropology Colloquium Series with a reception for Dr. Sinopoli following her lecture!

Long histories in a small region: documenting 3000 years of social and political change along the Tungabhadra River in Southern India

Carla Sinopoli

Director, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology &

Professor of Anthropology UNM

The central Tungabhadra River Valley—the hottest, driest, and one of the most inhospitable regions of southern India— seems an unlikely place to have been a center of innovation and cultural creativity. being.  Nonetheless, from the South Indian Neolithic, through the South Indian Iron Age and the emergence of South India’s largest and last precolonial empire, the inhabitants of the Tungabhadra River Valley domesticated new plant species, invented new technologies, and built one of the world’s largest precolonial cities.  Drawing on her more than 30 years of archaeological fieldwork along the Tungabhadra, Sinopoli introduces the Tungabhadra sequence and places it in the larger context of South Asian archaeology and anthropological discussions of deep histories and historical narratives.

Carla Sinopoli earned her BA at SUNY Binghamton and MA and PhD at the University of Michigan.  She came to UNM in October 2018, after 25 years as a Professor and Curator in the Department and Museum of Anthropology in the University of Michigan. Sinopoli has conducted archaeological research in Southern India since 1983, as a member of the Vijayanagara Research Project (1983-1986), co-director of the Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey (1988-1998) and co-director of the Early Historic Landscapes of the Tungabhadra Corridor (EHLTC) project (2003-present).  

For more information check out the flyer!