In another work, Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India (1985), on

which he worked as Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow, Professor Sharma has sought to unravel
the process of class formation, and social implications of the material changes in
the Vedic period and in the age of the Buddha on the basis of literary and archaeological
sources.
His Social Changes in Early Medieval India, being the first Dev Raj Chanana Memorial
Lecture, brought into focus the changes in social structure that accompanied the origin
and growth of feudalism in early India and in 1987 his Urban Decay in India (c.300
1000) drew attention to the overwhelming mass of archaeological evidence to
demonstrate the decline of urban centres in early medieval period which reinforces his
arguments regarding the genesis and growth of feudalism in India
Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India is a book by Professor Ram
Sharan Sharma, published in 1985. The author surveys theories of social change and
underlines the key role of production techniques together with climatic conditions in
shaping ancient social formations. Several questions are raised: What was the extent of
cattle pastoralism in early Vedic times and how was it linked with tribalism and booty
capture? Why could the later Vedic people not develop a full-fledged state and class
system? What part did iron play in war and production in northern India? Why did
Buddhism appear around 600 BC and why did this happen in the middle Gangetic
plains? How many forms of society are reflected in the epics? Rural relics of ancient life
and its glimpses in terracottas are also discussed. To tackle these problems, Vedic, epic
and Buddhist texts are examined in the light of material remains, tribal studies and
archaic social survivals.

Raymond Allchin was also active in the field, his first independent
project tackling the problem of the interpretation of the ash mounds in
Mysore and Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. These enigmatic
circular mounds survived up to 10 metres in height and were known to
be formed of alternating layers of ash and vitrified materials. Some
previous investigators had suggested that they were the sites of medieval
iron-working. Raymond selected one of the best-preserved, Utnur, and
began to excavate. In a single season in 1957, he cut through metres of
cinder and ash, and discovered that the mounds were formed by series
of superimposed burnt circular stockades. Disproving the medieval
hypothesis, he dated them far earlier, to the Neolithic of south India
(c3000BC), on account of the associated polished stone axes. He
interpreted them as annual cattle camps, whose accumulations of dung

were burnt at the end of each grazing season, thus creating a regular
sequence of ash and cinder. This discovery allowed him to distinguish a
distinct cultural sequence for peninsular India from its Neolithic to its
iron-age megalithic cemeteries, as well as providing him with the
opening to his report Neolithic Cattle-keepers of South India (1963):
"This is a book about cow-dung, or rather the ash of cow-dung."
Raymond later developed a keen interest in the archaeology of the early
historic period (c900BC-AD350), notably as to whether the Persian
empire had founded the region's earliest cities in the sixth century BC, a
model favored by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He focused on the early urban
evidence from north-west Pakistan and the cultural links between the
Taxila valley's sequence of three great early-historic cities the Bhir
Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh and the earlier series of megalithic
cemeteries in the northern valleys of Swat, Dir and Chitral, collectively
termed the Gandharan grave culture. Despite the clear later links
between Taxila and those northern valleys, as epitomized by its shared
Buddhist Gandharan style of sculpture, earlier evidence remained
elusive, until Raymond and his wife, the prehistorian Bridget Gordon,
wandered out eastwards from the Taxila site museum one February
morning in 1980.
During their walk, they discovered numerous shards of a distinctive,
highly burnished red ware at the foot of a spur called Hathial. Raymond
immediately recognized that these shards belonged to the burnished red
ware associated with the Gandharan grave culture, and dating to the
beginning of the first millennium BC. By demonstrating the presence of
a substantial settlement at the site, he concluded that the urban
sequence of Taxila, and by extension south Asia, was under way long
before Persian contact, going back to the late chalcolithic (copper age)
and iron age

 Childe has been considered the principal contributor to archaeological methodology in

the

first

part

of

the

20th

century.[114] His

theoretical

approach

blended

together Marxism, diffusionism, and functionalism.[115] Childe was critical of the

evolutionary archaeology which was dominant during the 19th century. He believed that
those archaeologists who adhered to it placed a greater emphasis on artifacts
themselves rather than their makers.[116] He recognized flaws in the technologicalbased three-age system first developed by Danish antiquarian Christian Jrgensen
Thomsen, rejecting its evolutionary chronology that divided prehistory into the Age,
Bronze, and Iron Age by noting that many of the world's societies were still effectively
Stone Age in their technology.[117] He nevertheless saw it as a useful model for analyzing
socio-economic development when combined with a Marxist model.[118] He therefore used
technological criteria for dividing up prehistory into three ages, but instead used
economic criteria for sub-dividing the Stone Age into the Palaeolithic and Neolithic,
rejecting the concept of the Mesolithic as useless

Childe was a proponent of the culture-historical approach to archaeology, coming to be

seen as one of its "founders and chief exponents". [120] Culture-historical archaeology
revolved around the concept of "culture", which it had adopted from anthropology. This
has been seen as "a major turning point in the history of the discipline", allowing
archaeologists to look at the past through a spatial dynamic rather than simply a
temporal one.[121] Childe adopted the concept of "culture" from German philologist and
archaeologist Gustav Kossinna, before using it in three of his books The Dawn of
European Civilization (1925), The Aryans (1926) and The Most Ancient East (1928)
without defining it.[122] He proceeded to give it a specifically archaeological definition
in The Danube in Prehistory (1929).[123] There, he defined a "culture" as being a set of
"regularly associated traits" in the material culture i.e. "pots, implements, ornaments,
burial rites, house forms" that are repeatedly found across a certain area. He stated
that in this respect a "culture" was the archaeological equivalent of a "people". Childe's

use of the term was non-racial, and he considered a "people" to be a social grouping,
not a biological race.[124] He opposed the equation of archaeological cultures with
biological races, as various nationalists were doing in Europe at the time, and was a
vociferous critic of Nazi uses of archaeology, arguing that the Jewish people were not a
distinct biological race but a socio-cultural grouping

In 1935, he suggested that culture worked as a "living functioning organism",

emphasizing the adaptive potential of material culture; in this he was influenced by
anthropological functionalism.[126] However, by the late 1940s he came to question the
utility of "culture" as an archaeological concept, and therefore the validity of the culturehistorical approach.[127] McNairn suggested that this was because the term had become
popular across the social sciences in reference to all learned modes of behavior, and not
just material culture as Childe had first used it. [128] He accepted that archaeologists
defined "cultures" based on a subjective selection of material criteria; this view later
came to be widely adopted by archaeologists like Colin Renfrew.

The term Neolithic Revolution was coined in 1923 by V. Gordon Childe to describe the
first in a series of agricultural revolutions in Middle Eastern history. The period is
described as a "revolution" to denote its importance, and the great significance and
degree of change affecting the communities in which new agricultural practices were
gradually adopted and refined

Processual

archaeology (formerly

the New

Archaeology)

is

form

of

archaeological that had its genesis in 1958 with the work of Gordon Willey and Philip
Phillips, Method and Theory in American Archeology, in which the pair stated that
"American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing" (Willey and Phillips, 1958:2), a
rephrasing of Frederic William Maitland's comment that "[m]y own belief is that by and
by, anthropology will have the choice between being history and being nothing." [1] This
idea implied that the goals of archaeology were, in fact, the goals of anthropology, which
were to answer questions about humans and human society. This was a critique of the
former period in archaeology, the Culture-Historical phase in which archaeologists
thought that any information which artifacts contained about past people and past ways
of life was lost once the items became included in the archaeological record. All they felt
could be done was to catalogue, describe, and create timelines based on the artifacts

 The theoretical frame at the heart of processual archaeology is cultural evolutionism.

Processual archaeologists are, in almost all cases, cultural evolutionists. It is from this
perspective that they believe they can understand past cultural systems through the
remains they left behind. This is because processual archaeologists adhere to Leslie
White's theory that culture can be defined as the exosomatic (outside the body) means
of environmental adaptation for humans.[5]In other words, they study cultural adaptation
to environmental change rather than the bodily adaptation over generations, which is
dealt with by evolutionary biologists.

Processualism began to be critiqued soon after it emerged, initiating a theoretical

movement that would come to be calledpost-processualism. Post-processualist
critics consider the main weaknesses of processual archaeology to be:

1. environmental determinism
2. lack of human agency
3. view of cultures as homeostatic, with cultural change only resulting from outside stimuli
4. failure to take into account factors such as gender, ethnicity, identity, social relations, etc.
5. supposed objectivity of interpretation

The

Ancient

Economy is

book

about

the

economic

system

of classical

antiquity written by the classicist Moses I. Finley. It was originally published in 1973.
Finley interprets the economy from 1000 BC to 500 AD sociologically, instead of using
economic models (like for example Michael Rostovtzeff). Finley attempted to prove that
the ancient economy was largely a byproduct of status. In other words, economic
systems were not interdependent; they were embedded in status positions. The analysis
owes some debt to sociologists such as Max Weber and Karl Polanyi.

To show how the economies of Ancient Greece and Rome differed from our times, he
first examines how the Ancients lacked even the concept of an "economy" in the way we
refer to it in our own times. Economy derives from a Greek word,, "one who
manages a household". The household was the most important economic unit. Of
course, they mined, taxed, and traded, but what the Ancients did not do was to combine
all their commercial activities into an overarching sub-system of society, a giant
marketplace where the means of production and distribution responded to market forces
such as the cost of labor, supply and demand, trade routes, etc. Moreover, Finley takes
the fact that the Ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a sophisticated accounting
system as well as how imprecise or carefree they are about numerical data to imply the
lack of an economy resembling Western modern ones that place exorbitant demands on
numerical computations and precise accounting records.

He also deals with the roles of orders and status. He argues that because the ancients
placed so much emphasis on status, which heavily regulated what commercial activities
was acceptable for those in the upper orders and well as the lower ones, their economy
differed from any modern economy where everyone was free and able to participate in
whatever legal commercial enterprise

Finley also discusses the institution of slavery which was very prominent in the Ancient
world. The relationship between master and slave was complex and even within slaves,
there was a diversity of societal rankings. Yet despite this complexity, Finley shows how
slavery provided free labour that at times had to be curtailed in order to provide work for
the native artisans. Slavery heavily influenced the value placed on labour and certain
jobs. Thus, the distribution of labour as well as the means of production that one sees in
the ancient economy was different from how modern economies function where human
capital plays a role in determinant of price as well as on supply.

Another relationship Finley discusses is the way the Ancients viewed the land. Land for
the Ancient Greeks and Romans was not seen as a capital investment where profits
could be obtained from the growing and selling of crops, but used as showpieces to
enhance one's status as well as something that was inherently desirable from a
traditional stand-point where economics played no part. To illustrate this, Finley turns to
one of Pliny's letters where he writes that he will have to borrow money to buy more
land. In the letter, Pliny does not discuss if this new purchase is an economically wise
one in terms of the profits that can be derived from it. The last part of the book, Finley

discusses the discrepancies between life in the city and country as well as how the State
did not play a role in managing the national economy and treasury in the same ways
modern governments are expected to do in most Western economies.

Finley's point here is that we need to conceptualize the ancient

economy in terms that are not drawn from current
understandings of capitalist market economies; these
economic concepts do not adequately capture the
socioeconomic realities of the ancient world. Finley argues that
the concepts and categories of modern market society fit the
socioeconomic realities of the ancient world very poorly. (In this
his approach resembles that of Karl Polanyi, who was indeed an
important influence on Finley.) One thing that is interesting in
this approach is that it is neither neo-classical nor Marxist.
So what distinguishes the "interlocking behaviour and
responses" of the ancient world? Finley's view is that the
dominant ethos of the ancient world is not one of producing for
accumulation, but rather maintaining status and the social
order. And these imply a society sharply divided between
haves and have-nots -- nobility and the poor. Finley takes issue
with the "individualist" view (43) as applied to the ancient
world, according to which each person is equally able to strive
for success based on his/her own merits. What he calls the
prevailing ideology is one of the moral legitimacy of
inequalities, social and economic. Hierarchy is normal in the
order of things, in the world view of the ancients. Even the
heterodox insistence in the modern world on the concepts of
class and exploitation, according to Finley, have little grip on
the ideologies and values of the ancients. The idea of the
working class fails to illuminate social realities of the ancient
world because it necessarily conflates free and bonded labor
(49).
There are only a few "structural" factors in Finley's account of
the ancient economy. The structure and social reality of

property is one -- the ownership of land and labor in the form of

estates, small farms, and slaves conditions much of productive
activity. Another is the availability of roads and water transport.
Production largely took place within one day's transport from
the consumers of that production. "Towns could not safely
outgrow the food production of their own immediate
hinterlands unless they had direct access to waterways" (126).
Finley summarizes the "balance of payments" through which
towns and cities supported themselves under four categories:
local agricultural production, the availability of special
resources like silver; the availability of trade and tourism; and
income from land ownership and empire