Ms. Ahana Ghosh is a doctoral scholar and Teaching Assistant at the Archaeological Sciences Centre, Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat. She is also a student ambassador from South Asia for the Society for Archaeological Sciences. She completed her master’s and M.Phil. in archaeology from the University of Kolkata, Kolkata, and Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune, Maharashtra respectively. Her research interest is grounded in the food archaeology of South Asia. Her work also elucidates the concept of “culinary landscape” and different aspects of “realities” and “representations” of food.
In the past, Ms. Ghosh held an Early Career Researcher position at the Rewriting World Archaeology program, Durham University, UK, and was Visiting Researcher at Stockholm University, Sweden as well as at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, US. She has published and co-authored papers and book chapters in many reputed international peer-reviewed journals like Holocene, Radio-Carbon, and Zenedo, and also presented her work at many international conferences. Moreover, she received “Student Research Support” from the Society for Archaeological Sciences for her doctoral project, and has shot a documentary film on the culinary journey of the communities living in the Dholavira village, Rann of Kutch, Gujarat.
Ms. Ghosh’s doctoral project explores the foodways of ancient Harappans from some of the selected settlements located in different geographical zones, like the Kutch region of Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Himachal Pradesh. Within foodways, she aims to explore their dietary and ritual practices by examining the biomolecular components lying in the organic residues within ceramics used by the inhabitants of these settlements. Dietary studies are still in the embryonic phase in South Asian archaeology. Thus, conventional ceramic studies must be reassessed and augmented with the latest scientific methodologies and different nuances of food anthropology and cultural ecology to develop a broader view of ancient foodways at the site-specific and panoptic regional level for the subcontinent’s first complex society. For the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research fellowship, Ms. Ghosh is working on the methodological and interpretational part of her doctoral project and is combining analytical outcomes with food anthropological theoretical abstractions.