Excavations at Sisupalgarh (Special Report No.2, 2008)

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It is indeed so nice of Dr. Monica L. Smith to have asked me to write a Foreword to the Report on the excavations at Sisupalgarh carried out by Dr. R.K. Mohanty and herself from 2005 to 2008. Without any hesitation, I can straightaway say that their work has definitely added a great deal to our knowledge of the site.

The reason why they have asked me to write the Foreword seems to be that I had carried out excavations at the site earlier (in 1948 and 1950) and they have consulted me on various aspects of the site before embarking on the field-work. In fact, almost every season, before proceeding to the site she has the courtesy of discussing the various issues with me and before returning to USA showing me on her laptop the new data obtained by them. How very generous of her!

While the entire Report is praiseworthy, there are two important aspects of the work which I would like to highlight. First. Although through my 1991 paper, published in Man and Environment 16(1):5-21, I had indicated that if large-scale horizontal excavations are carried out at the site, Sisupalgarh will reveal a town-plan based on a criss-cross pattern of streets, it was ordained for the team of Mohanty and Monica to establish duly that the streets did indeed run north-south and east-west. And this they have achieved even without carrying out tedious and time-consuming excavations. In this context, the reader's attention is invited to the Chapter 'Geophysical Survey at Sisupalgarh' and the two very revealing illustrations, numbered 2.1 and 2.3. I very much hope that this kind of survey-methodology is used by us at other prospective sites which are crying for the same.

Second. In my 1949 Report on the excavations at Sisupalgarh, I had published a photograph of the pillars located in the central part of the site, suggesting that these might represent a pillared hall, perhaps associated with a palace-complex. The Arthoædstro, an early historical treatise on polity and other allied topics, mentions: "In the midst of the houses of the people of all four castes and to the north from the centre of the ground inside the fort, the king's palace, facing either the north or east shall, as described elsewhere (Chap. XX, Book 1), be constructed occupying one-ninth of the whole site inside the fort."

The Early Historic city of Sisupalgarh is located on the southeastern edge of modern Bhubaneswar in Orissa state (Figure 1.1). The site measures 130 ha in size and has a rampart and moat that still measures up to 9 m in height and over 1 km in length on all sides. In addition to these ramparts, the site also contains numerous indicators of considerable labour investment in large-scale architecture such as stone ring wells throughout the site and stone columns and stone-lined ponds concentrated at the centre of the site. The size and organization of Sisupalgarh, along with the presence of Buddhist and Jain sites within a 10 km radius of the rampart zone, indicate a highly complex form of social and economic activity. This project was developed to assess how an ancient South Asian city functioned as the focal point for many different people and how such a city was sustained over many generations. The site of Sisupalgarh is remarkable because of its apparent abandonment in the early centuries A.D. Deposits of the Early Historic period form the uppermost layers, and these layers are covered only with a thin deposit of alluvium and wind- borne material. This is a considerable contrast to other early Indian cities, such as those in the Ganga plains, which have many occupational phases and in which the Early Historic levels are difficult to reach because of overlying medieval and modern deposits.

The site of Sisupalgarh was excavated in 1948 and again in 1950 by Prof. B.B. Lal of the Archaeological Survey of India (Lal 1949, 1991) The excavations exposed the northernmost gateway on the western side of the rampart. Near that excavated gateway was a trench exposing a habitation area on the interior of the site. There was also a trench across the western rampart to the south of the excavated gateway. There is a brief report of another excavation in 1966 by the Orissa State Department of Archaeology (Joshi 1984:227). These previous investigations provided the background for renewed investigation at the site.

This publication presents the results of four seasons of investigation of the habitations and the monumental architecture at Sisupalgarh. The present research project is a comprehensive one utilizing systematic surface survey and collections, topographic mapping, geophysical survey and excavation. In addition, a study was made of some of the ceramics from the 1948 and 1950 excavations now housed in the Purana Qila storage facility of the Archaeological Survey of India at New Delhi. Starting in 2005, excavations were jointly conducted by Dr. Rabindra Kumar Mohanty of Deccan College (India) and Dr. Monica L. Smith (University of California, Los Angeles USA) under a permit from the Government of India, through the Archaeological Survey of India and in collaboration with them.