This research investigates the knowledge architecture, adaptive behaviour, and systemic organisation of Indigenous healing systems among traditionally nomadic, family-level forager and hunter communities in the Nilambur Valley. Indigenous Knowledge (IK), understood as inter-generational, practice-embedded epistemology, is examined not as a static cultural relic but as a dynamic, evolving knowledge system responsive to ecological, socio-economic, and geo-cultural transitions.

The project critically analyses how development-led transformations, market-driven pressures, and landscape reconfiguration reshape community-level health ontologies, diagnostic frameworks, therapeutic practices, and the broader ethno-philosophy of wellbeing. Emphasis is placed on understanding how knowledge is re-contextualised, substituted, or hybridised as communities negotiate shifting environmental and cultural regimes.

A second analytical axis maps the structure, function, and efficiency of Indigenous health-delivery networks using social network analysis. This includes examining healer roles, knowledge transmission pathways, ritual specialists, gendered domains of expertise, and intra-community referral systems. The study aims to model this network as a complex, adaptive socio-medical system, and to propose an evidence-based integration framework for policymakers to support conservation, sustainable transmission, and potential alignment of Indigenous healing knowledge with national healthcare initiatives.

This research undertakes a systematic ethnoarchaeological examination of the Magico-Medicinal Practices (MMPs) of Mayong—an area historically associated with esoteric healing, ritual technologies, and Black Magic (BM). While magic–medicine entanglements have been well-documented in anthropology and folklore studies, their archaeological dimensions, material signatures, and knowledge systems remain critically underexplored.

The project re-contextualises ritual objects, symbolic assemblages, and practice-embedded material culture associated with MMPs and Magical Practices (MPs). Through object biography analysis, ritual ecology, spatial patterning, and semiotic decoding, the study interrogates how these practices function as intangible-tangible hybrids within the cultural landscape.

A core objective is to critique the disciplinary neglect of magico-medicinal knowledge within archaeology, where these practices have often been marginalised or socially excluded in scholarly narratives. The research evaluates socio-economic determinants of health, local healthcare pathways, and disparities between the selected practitioner communities and benchmark health indicators in India.

The study ultimately positions Mayong’s magico-medicinal system as a complex, culturally embedded therapeutic knowledge structure, offering a framework for recognising, preserving, and interpreting such systems within archaeological discourse.

This research interrogates the archaeology of medicine through the lens of the human–animal therapeutic interface, analyzing how Indigenous communities conceptualize, utilize, and encode animals within their healthcare knowledge systems. Focusing on isolated hunter-gatherer and forager groups across Southern and Northeastern India, the study examines how medical knowledge is embedded in material culture, subsistence strategies, ritual practice, and ecological relations.

Central to the project is an ethnoarchaeological reconstruction of animal-mediated healing, including the use of animal tissues, by-products, behavior-based analogies, and symbolic associations in diagnosis, treatment, and preventive healthcare. These practices are analyzed as bio-cultural technologies, shaped by long-term ecological adaptation, cultural memory, and inter-generational knowledge transfer.

The research further explores epidemiological transitions and community responses to zoonotic risk, environmental stress, and shifting disease ecologies. By mapping these practices onto archaeological signatures, such as faunal assemblages, medicinal refuse, tool use, and ritual paraphernalia, the study provides a framework for interpreting the archaeological visibility of medical behaviors.

This investigation positions Indigenous healthcare as a complex, adaptive system, where human–animal relationships are central to conceptualizing illness, constructing therapeutic logics, and maintaining community wellbeing. The broader aim is to demonstrate how traditional knowledge systems—rooted in ecological intimacy and material pragmatism—offer critical insights for the sustainable and ethical integration of human–animal relations in contemporary medical thought.

This project investigates the structure of landscapes and the factors driving change at a regional scale, with a focus on how contemporary hunter-gatherer communities negotiate and inhabit shifting environmental spaces. It analyses the interplay between ecological processes, land-use pressures, development-led interventions, and market influences that continually reconfigure the spatial and cultural fabric of the region. By examining mobility pathways, subsistence strategies, settlement decisions, and resource-use patterns, the research explores how hunter-gatherers adapt to and reinterpret landscapes undergoing rapid transformation. Particular attention is given to the ways in which environmental degradation, forest fragmentation, and altered access regimes influence both cultural practices and everyday interactions with the land. The project aims to map the dynamic relationship between people and place, revealing how communities re-anchor their identities, practices, and spatial logics within evolving regional landscapes. 

Resettlement—conceptualised as relocation plus restoration—is a complex, multi-actor process. In practice, it often prioritises cash and housing, weakens safeguards, and relies on top-down implementation through expropriation rather than participatory negotiation. As a result, essential elements that must be restored—assets, livelihoods, public services, and social networks—remain fractured, leading to long-term economic displacement.

The project foregrounds the territorial assumptions embedded in resettlement theory, where land is treated as inert, divisible, and alienable. This contrasts sharply with forager understandings of land as sentient, reciprocal, and co-agential. Displacement therefore results in ontological disarticulation—a rupture not only in residence but also in being, knowing, and relating to place.

Health impacts emerge clearly in resettlement zones: nutritional insecurity, disruption of ethno-medical systems, increased depression, PTSD, substance dependence, and the collapse of kin-based healthcare structures. The body becomes an archive of displacement, carrying somatic memories of rupture through chronic illness and embodied trauma, with women experiencing compounded burdens through reproductive and ritual responsibilities.