ABSTRACT
Archaeological discourses in Bangladesh, by conforming to the dominating traditions of historical archaeology, are predominantly shaped by and implicated with the concepts, narratives, and frameworks of the discipline of history. Theoretical and methodological issues and questions which are central to the discipline of archaeology are rarely addressed and endorsed in the dominant intellectual traditions. Spatiotemporal contexts are often relegated to a background for supplementing the simplified and homogenised linear historical narratives of prosperity, patronage of rulers, agrarian expansion, golden ages, and syncretistic traditions. The prolific debates which have made an important impact and intervention on the understanding of the historiography of early medieval and medieval have used archaeological data without, in most of the cases, engaging with the archaeological debates on the notion, nature, and context of archaeological data. In this chapter, questions have been raised about this conceptual and discursive comfort and normalcy the scholars inhabit within an institutionalised and nationalistic framework. Archaeological data from systematic full-coverage surveying and stratigraphically informed excavations as well as data from other disciplines, such as earth sciences, climate studies, anthropology, palaeoecology, and landscape archaeology are addressed and endorsed to propose methodologies for unsettling the comfort zones.
