The Bengal Delta is a fluid landscape, a waterborne land that is still being made and unmade. Due to the constant movements of its powerful rivers that alter the landscape radically and rapidly, the archaeological sites of the region are prone to damage and destruction due to natural reasons. Traditionally, archaeological sites situated in dynamic river terrains have been deemed too disrupted to provide significant cultural insights. Discoveries in these areas are typically regarded as secondary compared to the better-preserved regions of the upper and middle Ganga plains. Without absolute dating methods determining the spatial and temporal progression of human habitation in the delta’s active belt becomes challenging. Analyzing historical settlement trends in such landscapes is commonly viewed as an unproductive endeavor. This study is a study of a few archaeological sites that are located in the lower reaches of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, specifically in the district of South 24 Parganas in West Bengal (India) and around the Sundarbans mangrove forest. This work relies heavily on geospatial and remote sensing techniques, in addition to field explorations, to study how settlements grew in a fluvial landscape. It aims to demonstrate how detailed mapping of significant paleochannels, coupled with the utilization of digital elevation data, can facilitate the reconstruction of the archaeological landscape in a region that has long been inhabited but whose settlement patterns have not been thoroughly examined.

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Flooded and Forgotten: A Geospatial Study of Archaeological Sites of Deltaic Bengal

  • Samayita Banerjee

摘要

The Bengal Delta is a fluid landscape, a waterborne land that is still being made and unmade. Due to the constant movements of its powerful rivers that alter the landscape radically and rapidly, the archaeological sites of the region are prone to damage and destruction due to natural reasons. Traditionally, archaeological sites situated in dynamic river terrains have been deemed too disrupted to provide significant cultural insights. Discoveries in these areas are typically regarded as secondary compared to the better-preserved regions of the upper and middle Ganga plains. Without absolute dating methods determining the spatial and temporal progression of human habitation in the delta’s active belt becomes challenging. Analyzing historical settlement trends in such landscapes is commonly viewed as an unproductive endeavor. This study is a study of a few archaeological sites that are located in the lower reaches of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta, specifically in the district of South 24 Parganas in West Bengal (India) and around the Sundarbans mangrove forest. This work relies heavily on geospatial and remote sensing techniques, in addition to field explorations, to study how settlements grew in a fluvial landscape. It aims to demonstrate how detailed mapping of significant paleochannels, coupled with the utilization of digital elevation data, can facilitate the reconstruction of the archaeological landscape in a region that has long been inhabited but whose settlement patterns have not been thoroughly examined.