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This text seeks to provide an introductory outline of the history and theory of knowledge production, notwithstanding the vastness of the subject. It is a brief history of intellectual formation or history of ideas. One can see it as a textbook of historical epistemology, which in spatio-temporal terms historicises knowledge production and contextualises methodological development. It addresses the historical process of the social constitution of knowledge, that is, the social history of the making of knowledge.

From a critical review of excavation reports and narratives on the Bronze Age sites, it turns out that archaeological cultures in Indian civilisation are mostly archaeologists' constructions, resulting from the archaeologists' subjective classification and typology. It notes inconsistencies of typologies, their ineffectiveness in comprehending the past and failure to establish the structure of the total culture as well as the main features of people's conditions of life. Archaeologists' constructs of multiple micro-cultures of ceramic identity may thus tend to obfuscate the macro-picture of larger composite cultures in the long process of the formation of Indian civilisation.

Bhairabi Prasad Sahu and Hermann Kulke, eds, Interrogating Political Systems: Integrative Processes and States in Pre-modern India, New Delhi: Manohar, 2015, 553 pp.