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Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies
Episode: Pratik Chakrabarti, "Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020)
Description: In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging—often for sewage, transport, or minerals—revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants—past, present, and future.In Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the...