This study is concerned with change and continuity in the practice of Indian archaeology. Its characterization as a national tradition is examined in light of relations between local communities and the national government, and in terms of archaeological practices that developed in colonial India. The research employed geographic information systems and historical methods to highlight the importance of changes in the social and political organization of society for the study of the history of archaeology. It is argued that the questions archaeologists asked, the methods they employed and the evidence they deemed credible, served the interests of the colonial government, and that these understandings were reinterpreted as Indian or nationalistic ones. Moreover, in Independent India, archaeologists often served the social and political aims of the national government by justifying the displacement of local communities and by obscuring their interests in the preservation of cultural heritage and in the interpretation of archaeological data. In the Republic of India, a nationally-oriented framework has taken a caste-based view of prehistory. This perspective justified economic, social, cultural and political marginalization of aboriginal peoples. This view of the Indian past has excluded India's ethnic and linguistic minorities from social dynamics and social history. This, in turn, has influenced the potential and aims of Indian archaeology.