Situating the “Local” within the “Locale”

Abstract

Abstract The involvement of local communities in archaeological excavation is a mundane and common practice in India. This has been the case since field archaeology became an integral part of the colonial quest to study India’s deep past, which conversely had a profound impact in postcolonial Indian archaeology. What is not known clearly, however, is the nature and extent of the local community’s participation in such research programs. This leads one to ask the obvious: Was the research made explicit within a participatory praxis braiding together the archaeologists’ work with local communities, or engaging and collaborative with equitable research aim, or did such initiatives dismantle power structures and relations? These are some fundamental but head-on questions that generally come to mind. It is here that Indigenous archaeology situated within a postcolonial framework aided in alternative ways to approach Indigenous communities of the region over the study of their ancestral heritage sites. This piece, therefore, examines and situates three cases of community-based archaeological research undertaken in the Northeastern corner of India in Nagaland and outlines the scale of interactions at multiple levels between local communities and Indigenous archaeologists.