Paper short abstract:

A scientific and textual approach to climate and culture change in the Late Holocene of South Asia

Paper long abstract:

The semi-arid monsoon climate of South Asia was established by the mid-Holocene but this challenging environmental milieu was also punctuated by significant rapid climate change events, which shaped human-environmental interactions in urban and rural communities of the first and second millennium BCE. This paper deconstructs the history of stigmatization for people with leprosy, from the zero-point when leprosy first appears in the urban population at Harappa, to the institutionalized exclusion of people with leprosy by the Iron Age. Scientific sources of evidence, from human skeletal biology, suggest profound demographic and health consequences accompanied efforts of human communities to cope with climate and economic change c. 2000 BCE. Mortuary archaeology and an exegesis of Vedic texts demonstrate how moments of crisis in prehistory set a trajectory of differentiation and signification of leprosy and its sufferers in South Asia. This integrated approach to scientific and textual sources from the first and second millennium BCE destabilizes what is true about leprosy and its sufferers.