Crafting resonance: Empathy and belonging in ancient Rajasthan.

In this article I introduce the concept of resonance to interrogate how things and meanings are relevant beyond the cultural context within which they begin. The notion of resonance is theorized as an intangible affect that the material thing has beyond its formal physical boundaries within larger planes of perception creating dynamic relationships among humans/nonhumans and illustrating cultural decisions of material as vibrant matter. If material has vibrancy and frequency it then has the capacity to evoke an emotional and affective response to a similarity of material, style, and/or form. Such response can be coded as a sensory aesthetic empathy that links to constituting subjective belonging in the ancient world. In order to explore how resonance might be useful in an archaeological context, this article will utilize copper arrowheads documented from the 1978 to 1979 excavations at the site of Ganeshwar, in the state of Rajasthan, India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]