The colonial misrepresentation of Indian forest peoples or “tribes” as primitives, that is, as ahistorical communities populated by irrational individuals, constructed them as the subject of ethnographic studies rather than archaeological research. The marginalisation of the histories of Indian forest-dwellers and the delegitimisation of their knowledge resulted in only limited exploration and investigation of the forests and consequent methodological and theoretical gaps in research on past forest peoples. This article argues that archaeological practice in Indian forests needs to move on from its Eurocentric foundations rooted in racial theories and sustained by Brahmanical norms. This requires the development of a transdisciplinary framework that combines conventional archaeological methodologies with Indigenous worldviews and ways of knowing to better understand the past of India’s forest communities. This article focuses on the plateau of the Nilgiri mountains of southern India, a region of subtropical montane forests and home to several “tribal” communities and is structured in three sections. The first explores Indigenous understandings of space and time, contrasting their relational and cyclical characteristics with Eurocentric conceptualizations, and highlights their relevance to decolonising archaeological practice. The second examines the historical marginalisation of Indian upland forest communities within the colonial and Brahmanical ideological contexts and provides an overview of the archaeology of the Nilgiri plateau. The final section focuses on the Toda community’s spatial and temporal frameworks and discusses how their integration into archaeological analyses enhances methodologies by challenging disciplinary norms and enabling inclusive interpretations of cultural and historical complexity.
Daniela De Simone (Fri,) studied this question.