Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría. I am currently Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.  My interests include colonialism, materiality and power, political economy, and technology.  These interests have converged in two main lines of research.  First, I study in the relationship between power struggles and cultural change, specifically in the ways in which material culture is involved in processes of colonialism and empire-building.  Second, I research technology and the ways that the political economy can affect processes of technological change.  My empirical work is a combination of archaeology, ethnohistory, and archaeometry, and it focuses on central Mexico, especially during the Aztec era and the early Colonial period.  I have worked in Mexico City at the Templo Mayor Museum, Xaltocan, and Tula.  

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/anthropology/faculty/err236

Namita Sugandhi.  My earlier dissertation work was on the Mauryan empire and its relationship to the Southern Deccan in peninsular India.  I am currently working on a field project in southeastern Rajasthan that examines questions about long term interregional interaction and issue of site preservation and heritage management in rural South Asia.  My research interests include the study of sovereignty in South Asia, non-territorial models of early states, decolonized strategies of archaeological practice and the integration of archaeological and textual records. I am currently a Lecturer at Indiana University Northwest.

namitasugandhi@gmail.com

Andrew Bauer. My dissertation research examined Iron Age (1200-300 BC) land use and settlement patterns in the environs of Kadebakele, a large settlementsituated on the Tungabhadra River in Karnataka, South India. In this project, I combined archaeological survey with multi-spectral remote sensing and sediment, soil, and pollen analyses. Using these diverse datasets, I demonstrated that a series of environmental “objects” (e.g., rock pools, soil distributions, inselberg features) that are widely believed to be natural landscape elements were created during the Iron Age as a means of appropriating space for politically instrumental ritual activities and agro-pastoral production. As a follow-up to this research, I am currently carrying out an archival project on British colonial geology, which would come to understand South India's more recent landscape features without considering anthropogenic formation processes. At the same time, I am planning to return to the field to continue documenting the historical ecology of northern Karnataka, with particular emphasis on the transition from Iron Age political configurations to the early dynastic polities of South India.