About Sanjyot Mehendale:
Raised in India and The Netherlands, I began my academic career in 1985 at the University of Amsterdam. After receiving my Propedeuse (B.A.) degree in western art history and classical archaeology in 1986, I began graduate studies at the University of Amsterdam in South Asian archaeology and art history. In 1992, I received a Doctorandus degree cum laude from the Department of Indo-Iranian Languages and Culture, Rijksuniversity of Leiden, The Netherlands.
During my graduate studies, I became increasingly interested in the art and archaeology of the ancient Silk Roads of Central Asia, and particularly in the social, political and artistic synergies produced by cross-cultural exchanges along those vast trade routes. While working on my first graduate degree I learned of Professors Guitty Azarpay and David Stronach of the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), Department of Near Eastern Studies, and of their interest in and work on ancient Central Asia. I began a doctoral program at UCB under their auspices in 1992, advancing to candidacy in 199
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My doctoral work, which was supported by a number of grants (Paul J. Alexander Memorial Fellowship, 1996; UCB Graduate Division Humanities Research Grant, 1995 and 1996; Vice Chancellor for Research Fund Grant, 1994-1995; and several travel grants), focused on ancient Silk Roads sites in Central Asia and in particular in Afghanistan, concentrating on cross-cultural elements revealed through the arts that flourished in the region. In 1997, after extensive research at Musée Guimet in Paris and supported by a Mabelle McLeod Lewis Dissertation Fellowship, I completed a dissertation on the famous Begram (Afghanistan) objects, which included a reexamination of, and ultimately new interpretations about, the nature of the finds, as well as a complete catalogue of the extensive ivory and bone objects discovered at the site. This work,titled Begram: New Perspectives on the Ivory and Bone Carvings, is the only comprehensive study of these finds since their discovery in 1937-1939, and was nominated as its “Outstanding Dissertation in the Fine Arts and Humanities” for 1997 by the University of California at Berkeley.
During the period of my doctoral research, I was also the founder (1994) and co-director of U.C. Berkeley's Central Asia/Silk Road Working Group. This interdisciplinary group draws together faculty and graduate students from diverse departments, whose research interests bear on Central Asia or the Silk Roads.
After completion of my dissertation, I began teaching on Central Asia in UCB’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. I also became interested in instituting a research project in the region. In 1999, I developed and became the co-director of a joint project with the Uzbek Institute of Archaeology in Samarkand to excavate sites in the southern Sogdian region of the country. The Uzbek-Berkeley Archaeological Mission’s work has been supported by grants from the Stahl Fund and the Mellon Foundation.
In addition to teaching on Central Asia and working as an archaeologist in Uzbekistan, I began to develop the Central Asia/Silk Road Working Group into a larger program institutionalized within the University of California at Berkeley. In 2001, these efforts were realized: under the auspices of the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Caucasus and Central Asia Program was established to support research and teaching on the region. I served as its Executive Director until 2005.
Recent research and writing projects have been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I was awarded for the 2003-2004 academic year. In light of the long series of crises in Afghanistan, I have been seeking ways to ensure the continued existence of a full record of the remarkable objects from the ancient site at Begram, the entire collection of which at the Kabul Museum has been looted, destroyed or otherwise disappeared. Copies of the original archaeological reports, published in France in the 1930s and 1940s, are extremely rare and are inaccessible to English-only readers. And the photographic archives at Musée Guimet in Paris are fading and will be lost if not digitally reproduced. With support from the NEH and together with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI)[1] at U.C. Berkeley, I was able to develop a virtual catalogue of the Begram ivory and bone objects that combines text and images in a searchable database. It is the only extant complete record of these Begram finds and it is designed to be accessible worldwide via the Internet, both to scholars and to the general public.
In 2007, I was hired as a consultant by National Geographic Society to help structure the Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul exhibition as well as to contribute to the accompanying catalogue. In the same year, I became the program director of the Silk Road Initiative through the Center for Buddhist Studies and the co-director of a joint US-France-Sri Lanka archaeological project.
Currently, I teach in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and the Group in Buddhist Studies, both at the University of California, Berkeley.