Mamta Dwivedi, a historian by training, was awarded her PhD degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, in 2016. Her doctoral research aimed at understanding the concept of wealth (artha), with specific focus on North India in the early historical period. Her study combined data from archaeology and numismatics with early historic śāstric literature to understand artha both as a pursuit of wealth as well as its material manifestation in tangible forms.   Her research also critiques the methodology and interpretation employed to study coins as source of history which she thinks is a persistent continuation of colonial methodology. She was affiliated to Distant Worlds Graduate School for Ancient Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), Munich, as a visiting researcher from February 2016 to August 2017, where she developed an interest in studying ‘ritual economies’ of the past and exploring the Indic connections of material remains in early historical Gandhāran region.