tiatoshi@nagalanduniversity.ac.in
Since 1999, I have been engaged in teaching and research in the Department of History & Archaeology, Nagaland University, Kohima Campus with an administrative component where I was the former Head of Department (2018-2021).Under the German Research Foundation, I was also Mercator Fellow at the Institute of Pre-&-Protohistoric Archaeology, Kiel University, Germany (Aug-Oct, 2022).
Over the last more than a decade, I have been engaged in archaeological research on Naga ancestral sites dealing with the emergence of vegeculture/agriculture, village settlements, material culture, and social complexities. Trained as both an archaeologist and cultural anthropologist, I have undertaken multidisciplinary research with national and international institutions and co-published with colleagues on the ethnoarchaeology of Naga stone monuments and mortuary practices; time, archaeology & oral tradition; community archaeology and decoloniality; lithic technology and ethnotechnology of iron production; bioarchaeology of jar/pit burials and symbolic representations in the material world; the zooarchaeology and archaeobotany of Naga ancestral sites and prehistoric cave sites; palaeoclimate and archaeology, soil micromorphology and cave archaeology. More recently, as part of joint collaborative research with colleagues from NEHU, Tura Campus; UCC, Shillong; Directorate of Archaeology, Assam and the University of Melbourne, and Australian National University, my interest have turned to the enigmatic culture of the Stone Jars of North Cachar Hills, Assam (Dima Hasao) and the Saipung forest of Meghalaya, East Jaintia Hills and their historical linkages with the Plain of Jars, Laos. Currently, my primary region of practice is Northeast Indian prehistory covering the states of Nagaland, Assam and Meghalaya. Our future collaborative research with various institutions targets to incorporate other states of NE India covering Arunachal, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura with the aim to investigate early humansprehistoric migration to Mainland SE Asia through the corridor of NE India.