The Transformative Context of a Temple in Early Medieval Varendri: Report of the Excavation at Tileshwarir Aara in Dinajpur District, Bangladesh

Abstract

Conventional wisdom about Varendri, a sub-region of ‘early medieval’ Bengal, is dominantly dependent upon epigraphic and textual sources. The role of archaeological narratives has been reduced by an approach to corroborate these dominant histories, although systematic and critically informed archaeological researches in this sub-region are quite scanty. In this paper, the excavation of a structural mound in one of the early medieval settlements located in the hinterland zone between two of the early urban centres – Mahasthangarh and Bangarh – is reported. A brick-built structural assemblage has been revealed through the excavation. Tentatively identified as a Brahmanical temple, the structural assemblage has been found to have gone through several changes during its lifetime according to the stratigraphic understanding and interpretations. These shifts might have resulted in the transformation of its function and significance in the context of the settlement(s). The temple along with other predominantly religious edifices was the core around which the settlement was formed and developed. Although inscriptional references suggest that the settlement evolved from a village to a centre of a geo-administrative unit called Chandagrama Visaya, the urban character of the settlement cannot be proved on the basis of archaeological evidence. The settlement could be identified within an indistinguishable zone between the rural and the urban according to the spatial organization of cultural materials, location of the settlement in the local settlement network, and the settlement size.