A City in Transition: The Urban Process of Nepal’s Western Terai in the First Millennium CE

Abstract

This thesis addresses the transformation of the urban landscape in Nepal’s western Terai during the first millennium CE marked by the decline of the once prosperous Early Historic city, Tilaurakot, and the rise of temples as new central places. The urban change has been noticed previously but barely given due attention, since the Early Historic archaeologists have overwhelmingly focused on the genesis of the City rather than later urban development. It was brought to the fore by the historian R.S. Sharma who proposed a pan-subcontinent urban decline after the third century CE. Despite the divergence of opinion, it has been recognised that the change is associated with a series of transitions in the social, political and religious realms during the latter half of the first millennium CE. However, due to the limits of written sources and the dearth of reliable archaeological data, neither the nature of the change nor when and how that happened has been clarified.

The new data generated from the archaeological investigations under the Japanese-Funds-in-Trust-for-UNESCO project provides the opportunity to tackle the urban change with a refined chronological framework. The developmental trajectories of Tilaurakot and the habitation sites are built up to examine the socio-economic structure and interrelation as the city prospered and declined. The rise of the temple institutions is situated in the evolution of the ritual landscape and underpinning social linkages, so as to understand how they were differentiated from other and earlier categories of ritual sites. Finally, the discerned patterns are compared to the urban dynamics in the central Gangetic plain, where similar rhythms have been recognised. It is argued that, while associated with broader historical processes, the urban change of the study area demonstrates distinct patterns that bear no little relation to its physical-locational setting.