In partnership with Penn Classical Studies Dept, EnviroLab, the South Asia Center & South Asia Studies Dept
Thomas F. Tartaron
Associate Professor, Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Thursday, April 23, 2026 - 12:00PM
Center for the Advanced Study of India
Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics
133 South 36th Street (Suite 230)
Philadelphia PA 19104-6215
About the Seminar:
The “traditional” ways of life that fishing communities inhabiting Kerala’s long Indian Ocean seacoast have followed for centuries are disappearing under threats from multiple sources, including industrial fishing, climate change, coastal engineering, technological innovation, and broader social dislocation. These communities have been the subject of many ethnographic studies in recent decades, focused primarily on contemporary topics such as caste, gender, climate change, political struggle against external interventions, and the social changes that have occurred as a result of post- independence integration into Indian Ocean and global economies. There has been relatively little attention paid, however, to situating these fisherfolk in the long-term history of the seacoast or addressing continuity and change over centuries and millennia. The Kerala Maritime Communities Project (KMCP) takes a more explicitly historical and materialist approach to the environmental, social, and historical factors that have shaped life in the fishing communities of coastal Kerala in the past. Currently, KMCP’s team of 10 has transcribed and translated over 150 interviews, built a basic GIS, and consulted archival and ancient texts. In this seminar, Professor Tartaron will explain the structure and accomplishments of KMCP to date. Using a broad conceptual framework of space and time, he will address conceptions of the coast and emphasize the value of the Kerala case for comparative, cross-cultural ethnoarchaeology.
Full CASI Spring 2026 Events Flyer
Thomas F. Tartaron is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is Executive Director of the Center for the Analysis of Archaeological Materials (CAAM) in the Penn Museum and Associate Curator in the Museum’s Mediterranean Section. He has participated in numerous archaeological and ethnographic projects in Greece, Cyprus, Iraq, India, and the United States. He has a particular interest in local-scale maritime networks and exploring the lived experiences of small coastal communities. His 2013 book Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World was awarded the James R. Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America. Since 2014, he has been co-PI of the Kerala Maritime Communities Project (KMCP) with P. Sanal Mohan, Professor Emeritus of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala. Using oral histories and other ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological methods, the main aims of KMCP are to preserve aspects of vanishing cultural heritage of traditional fishers; to study the stresses on their communities from climate change, coastal engineering, and other factors; and to advance Kerala as a cross-cultural case study in the long-term history of fishing societies.