UCLA

Urbanism has been a continuous part of the landscape of the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years. During the Early Historic Period of South Asia, urban centers flourished and acted as the backdrop to many new innovations, including the development of widely used systems of writing and of novel religious movements such as Buddhism and Jainism which emphasized non-violence toward living things, or ahimsa, as a key part of their philosophies. Within the urban settings of the Early Historic period, people engaged in myriad relationships with non-human animals, continuing long-standing trajectories which date back to the origins of our species. In this dissertation, I explore how human relationships with animals in urban spaces changed in response to the adoption of the new approaches to humans’ role in the environment encapsulated by Buddhism and Jainism. In order to do this, I identified and analyzed the corpus of faunal material recovered during excavations conducted from 2005 to 2009 at the urban site of Sisupalgarh located near the city of Bhubaneswar in modern-day Odisha, eastern India. Sisupalgarh was a major urban center of this region occupied from the mid-first millennium BCE to the mid-first millennium CE. This period of occupation encompasses the time period before Buddhism and Jainism became widely adopted in eastern India to a time when they appear to have become well established. In order to contextualize data from my analysis of the faunal material, I compared the patterns suggested by that analysis to patterns implied by the rich textual record dating to this time period. My analyses showed that, during the early part of Sisupalgarh’s occupation, the residents of the city had a broad-based economy based on the use of many different types of animals, including a wide variety of both wild and domestic taxa. This diversity of animal usage declined during the period of occupation, and in the later part of its occupation, Sisupalgarh’s people appear to have been using a very limited set of animal products consistent with the adoption of ahimsa as a guiding principle for human-animal interactions.