archaeology

Traditional Bronze Casters in Tamil Nadu

    This a project represents a long-term study of the social context of traditional metal casters in the village of Swamimalai, located ca. 275 km southwest of Chennai (Madras), in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu.  Tamil Nadu was home to the Chola Empire.  The Cholas came to power in the late 9th century A.D., and until the late 13th century A.D., they ruled most of South India, Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands, and even parts of the Indonesian island of Java from their homeland near Thanjavur (Tanjore) around 30 km from the Swamimalai study area.  Specifically, I am interested in the social organization of traditional metal production and the patterns of consumption of the bronze statuary produced by the workshops in Swamimalai.  As such, this project is an ethnoarchaeological study of contemporary craft production.  Ethnoarchaeology refers to the study of contemporary cultures with the aim of understanding the behavioral relationships that underlie the production of material culture.  Using the observational methods of cultural anthropologists, archaeologists conduct ethnoarchaeological research with the aim of producing models (based on observations of contemporary societies) that are applicable to the archaeological record.  This study is an outgrowth of my long-term interest in the role of metallurgy in the social evolution of societies in the Near East.  As such this ethnoarchaeological research of traditional bronze casters has important processual implications for my research of historic, Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 500 B.C.), metal production in southern Jordan.

The Study Area

    The village of Swamimalai, which I visited in 2003 and 2005, offers a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between material culture, social organization and exchange as this is one of the few places in the world which preserves the lost-wax method of metal production that was perfected around 1000 AD during the Chola Empire.  The lost-wax method is known in Sanskrit as madhuchchishtavidhana.   With some 200 traditional bronze casting workshops, our team continues the inventory of these workshops with the aim of collecting data on the degree to which the bronze casters are hereditary (sthapathis) and how metal production varies with regard to the production of metal statuary for the sacred (Hindu temples) and profane (tourist industry).  The 2005 research focused on the organization of metal production.  Six workshops were visited and one studied in detail. These data will be published in the near future.  While preliminary field work  succeeded in acquiring detailed genealogical information concerning one of the most prominent Sthapathis families (S. Devasenapathy Stapathy Sons) extending back some 300 years, the women are missing from the genealogical tree.  To fully understand the organization of traditional metal production, it is essential to identify the role of women in forming the invisible bonds that maintain this special social group of metal workers.  Thus, the future research will focus the role of women in Sthapathi village society as well as the inventorying all the workshops in the village.

 
Ethnoarchaeology team member Alina Levy arrives by auto-rickshaw at one of the bronze workshops. 

Village children share a laugh with the ethnoarchaeology team. 

Collection of superb bronze icons for sale in the Swamimalai village cooperative shop. 

Making a wax model of the goddess Parvati in one of  the village workshops. 

Master craftsman, Radakrishna Stahpathy, one of the sons of the great bronze craftsman—S. Devasenapathy—engraving a bronze icon.