Maldivian Archaeology

The Maldives are an archipelago located centrally in the northern Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka and India (see Fig. 1). The occupation history is layered, largely because the Maldives acted as a historical waypoint for seafarers traveling across the Indian Ocean (Maloney 2013; Mohamed 2005). Investigations into the material remains of past occupation were initiated in the mid-1800s, through a series of antiquarian investigations. Archaeology during the early 1900s tended to focus on establishing the nature of a pre-existing Buddhist occupation phase, with more recent investigations establishing the role of the islands within past globalizations (Litster 2016) and the export of cowry shell money (Haour et al. 2016, 2017; Mikkelsen 2000). This encyclopedia entry focuses on the archaeological research undertaken in the Maldives, concentrating on the historical development of the discipline in the region