ABSTRACT
Muziris, which had attracted traders from the Mediterranean world for a very long span of time as the biggest supplier of spices, has now become one of the major historical sites that the archaeologists and historians of South Asia have been trying to geographically locate and identify. With the archaeological excavations at Pattanam, which brought to limelight particularly the material culture related to intense Roman commerce, there were frequent attempts to identify it with Muziris. However there are some historians, including M.G.S. Narayanan, who think that though the material objects from Pattanam are indicative of its strong trade relations with Rome, they are not sufficient enough to prove categorically that Pattanam was the actual site of Muziris. The recent scholarship on Muziris and the scholarly debates around it make maritime historians look at Muziris in the age of ‘early global trade’ by highlighting larger connections and locating its position in the trajectories of commodity movements within the Indian Ocean and outside, besides its physiological position in Kerala’s geography. This paper tries to look into the nuanced and changing character that Muziris acquired over the years by its participation in the larger network of commodity movements.
