Seminar on “Conversing between Oral Narratives and Archaeology: A Multi-disciplinary Approach”

The application of multi-disciplinary approaches to studies in archaeology of Northeast India have significantly accentuated our understanding of the region’s past. Time and again, the potential of the entire region to understand early human movements, migration, settlement and subsistence patterns have been echoed and envisaged. In several ways though, the complex nature of conventional material remains or the absence of it in order to reconstruct the region’s past, has greatly shaped the manner in which archaeology is practiced (methodologically). As such, the paper is an attempt to piece together such developments and in particular, explore the nature and relationship between oral narratives and archaeology. Precisely, the paper seeks to evaluate studies centered on ancestral sites in Nagaland.