This paper examines the case of the court-ordered excavations at Ayodhya to understand the process by which archaeological evidence as expert opinion was reconfigured into judicial evidence in a civil lawsuit. Being an exceptional site of enquiry where two institutions of the Indian state — the High Court of Allahabad and the Archaeological Survey of India — come together, the Ayodhya case allows us to complicate the uses and abuses of archaeology. An examination of the orders and documents related to the excavations and the judgment made by the Allahabad High Court shows the production of archaeological knowledge at Ayodhya as highly mediated. The paper argues that this process is determined by the notions shared by both the institutions about archaeology-as-science and about scientific/archaeological expertise, regulated at each stage through judicial interventions and informed by the role that the Archaeological Survey of India and the archaeology profession has played in the production of a nationalist past in India. The employment of archaeology as legal evidence in the Ayodhya case is contingent upon the masking of these mediating roles.

中文翻译：

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“订购”发掘：考古学宪法作为阿约提亚案中的法律证据

本文以阿约提亚法院下令发掘的案例为例，以了解作为专家意见的考古证据在民事诉讼中被重新配置为司法证据的过程。作为一个特殊的调查地点，印度国家的两个机构——阿拉哈巴德高等法院和印度考古调查局——走到一起，阿约提亚案使我们能够使考古学的使用和滥用复杂化。对与发掘有关的命令和文件以及阿拉哈巴德高等法院作出的判决的审查表明，阿约提亚考古知识的产生是高度中介化的。这篇论文认为，这个过程是由两个机构共同的关于考古学和科学/考古专业知识的概念决定的，通过司法干预在每个阶段进行监管，并了解印度考古调查和考古专业在印度民族主义历史的产生中所发挥的作用。在阿约提亚案中使用考古学作为法律证据取决于这些调解角色的掩盖。