School of Humanities

J.S. Kharakwal did his masters from Kumaun University, Nainital and Ph. D form Deccan College, Pune in the year 1994, on the Archaeology of Central Himalayan Region. He spearheaded archaeological excavations at Kanmer, a Harappan site in Kachchh, Gujarat (2005 to 2016), Chandravati, near Abu Road (2013-16) and at Zawar (2019). He has published widely on Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Gujarat which include 6 books, 4 monographs and 80 research papers in various journals like Antiquity, Archaeological Science, Radiocarbon, Man and Environment, and others.

He was awarded a post doctoral fellowship of Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan for 15 months (2001-2002) and subsequently invited as a Visiting Professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto, Japan for one year (2004-2005).

He is a member of various national and international academic societies. He has participated in various national and international seminars in several countries such as France, Austria, Italy, Japan, Turkmenistan, China, Vietnam and Iran. He has organized national and international seminars, symposia, workshops and has participated in seminars in various countries in Europe and Asia. He also enjoyed an opportunity to deliver presidential address in the year 2021 in Haryana History Congress, Kurukshetra.

He is a member of LOCF Committee of UGC for Archaeology and Traditional Knowledge Committee of CSIR, New Delhi. He is a member of BoS of a few universities. He is currently working as Director of Sahitya Sansthan, JRN Rajasthan Vidyapeeth, (Deemed University), Udaipur, Rajasthan.

Samayita Banerjee is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Heritage Science and Society Programme at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru. Her work at NIAS focuses on the spatial documentation and GIS analysis of cultural heritage landscapes across India as part of the project Towards a National Cultural Landscape Information System, which is developing the KASTURI Portal, India's first curated geospatial heritage platform hosted on ISRO-Bhuvan. Her contributions include landscape mapping, dataset validation, and the development of spatial narratives for understudied archaeological sites. Her broader research specialisation lies in the landscape archaeology and geoarchaeology of South Asia, with a particular focus on human-environment interactions in the deltaic and coastal zones of Bengal and the forested uplands of central India.