Faculty & Staff
New Faculty
Rahul Oka
Appointed as Assistant Professor Fall 2010
B.A. Lawrence University, 2000
M.A. University of Illinois Chicago and Field Museum, 2001
Ph.D. University of Illinois Chicago and Field Museum, 2008
There are those who know exactly what they want to become since childhood. I am one of those lucky ones. My mother visited an American university two years before my birth and decided that her children would become academics. Although I knew how to speak as much as an academic after kissing the Blarney Stone in 1979, my specific interest in anthropology and academia had to wait until the early 1980s when I was introduced to the most famous archaeologist in the world via Mr. Spielberg: Indiana Jones. I announced to my parents that I wanted to become an archaeologist. In their infinite wisdom, they supported me in my ambition (and my movie tastes), and decided to introduce me to 'real' archaeologists. My uncle and grand-uncle were professors of archaeology at the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, in Pune, India. There I was introduced to 'real' archaeology and they also advised me to go to the U.S. to study archaeology as anthropology. On that visit, I met a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania who were painstakingly analyzing faunal remains from a Chalcolithic site (ca. 1000 BCE) in Western India. My thoughts at that point were: first, these people came all the way from the US to study bones; second, they treated an eight year old with concern and respect; and third, knowledge for the sake of knowledge was exactly how I wanted to spend my life. I spent the next few years of my life warding off calls from relatives to go to engineering, medicine, or computer science. In rejecting these calls, I found encouragements from both my parents and my Jesuit teachers at Loyola High School in Pune, India.
Going from India to Singapore, and thence to Lawrence University in Appleton, WI, to study anthropology was like homecoming. The greatest gift that a liberal arts education gives is the knowledge that disciplinary boundaries are mutable, and anthropology is the best place to practice multi-disciplinary research. Attending graduate school at the joint program of Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Illinois at Chicago allowed me to build a dissertation project and research program that combined ethnographic data, economic modeling, chemical analysis of ceramics, and archaeological analysis of materials from two sites separated by an ocean (Chaul, India and Mtwapa, Kenya).
In 2007, after finishing my dissertation, I had an encounter in a conflict zone in the Pokot province of Western Kenya and coming out of the danger, I thanked the powers above for my safe return, and immediately decided to focus on trade in conflict areas, specifically on trade, development, and relief in war zones in Kenya. Over the past 3 years, the dangers have not abated but the area of research had widened to Sudan, Uganda, and Somalia. The project involves long hours documenting commodity flows, understanding the trade networks, as well as riding in the traders' trucks across conflict areas, interacting with various militia groups and military personnel, and drinking endless cups of tea with NGO workers, smugglers, warlords, and refugees. The data brought out will be used to provide locally feasible relief and development to these and other unstable areas.
These projects as well as my ongoing archaeological interests in East Africa and South Asia are a part of my general research program to develop a broader multi-disciplinary understanding of the emergence and transformations in social inequalities. My goal is to be able to accurately and precisely describe such processes in the past and the present, most important, to predict future unfolding and impacts of inequalities.
I have published various articles on evolution of inequalities and cooperation, on the archaeology and anthropology of trade, on disaster commerce, and on ancient and modern business practices in the Monographs of the Society for Economic Anthropology, the Journal of Archaeological Research, the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and Archaeometry. I am currently working on articles describing my research on trade networks and inequities in war zones and refugee camps in East Africa.
Contact Information
645 Flanner Hall
574-631-1372
roka@nd.edu