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This fascinating study is the first detailed description of the ancient and enduring trade in beads that spans more than two millennia and once stretched from the Middle East to East Asia and affected areas as far apart as West Africa and the American Pacific coast. Beads are universal and among the earliest art forms. Made of glass, semiprecious stone, or precious organic materials such as amber and coral, they were ubiquitous in the ancient world, serving as decorations, magical charms, mnemonic and counting devices, symbols of wealth and status. Much of the ancient bead trade was incorporated in Asian maritime commerce, and many of the beads involved have Asian origins. Peter Francis, Jr., a pioneer in bead studies, incorporates firsthand knowledge of beads and beadmaking in the field with years of solid, scholarly research, effectively eliminating much of the hearsay and speculation that so often characterizes works on beads. In addition to the production, use, and provenance of beads, he examines the importance of the bead trade for the economies of the countries involved and provides insights into the lives of its many participants: artisans, mariners, and merchants. He covers the widely-dispersed Indo-Pacific beads (sometimes called Trade Wind beads or mutisalah), Chinese glass beads, Middle Eastern glass beads, Indian stone beads, heirloom beads in Southeast Asia and Micronesia, and other minor beads and bead industries involved in the trade.
Interpreting Southeast Asia's Past: Monument, Image and Text features 31 papers read at the 10th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists, held in London in September 2004. The volume covers monumental arts, sculpture and painting, epigraphy and heritage management across mainland Southeast Asia and as far south as Indonesia. New research on monumental arts includes chapters on the Bayon of Angkor and the great brick temple sites of Champa. There is an article discussing the purpose of making and erecting sacred sculptures in the ancient world and accounts of research on the sacred art of Burma, Thailand and southern China (including the first study of the few surviving Saiva images in Burma), of a spectacular find of bronze Mahayana Buddhas, and of the sculpted bronzes of the Dian culture. New research on craft goods and crafting techniques deals with ancient Khmer materials, including recently discovered ceramic kiln sites, the sandstone sources of major Khmer sculptures, and the rare remaining traces of paint, plaster and stucco on stone and brick buildings. More widely distributed goods also receive attention, including Southeast Asian glass beads, and there are contributions on Southeast Asian heritage and conservation, including research on Angkor as a living World Heritage site and discussion of a UNESCO project on the stone jars of the Plain of Jars in Laos that combines recording, safeguarding, bomb clearance, and eco-tourism development.
Describes the important influence of Asia's great civilization on the West, as traveling merchants, scholars, philosophers, and religious figures brought the wisdom of China and the Middle East to medieval Europe during the Dark Ages.
Glass beads, both beautiful and portable, have been produced and traded globally for thousands of years. Modern archaeologists study these artifacts through sophisticated methods that analyze the glass composition, a process which can be utilized to trace bead usage through time and across regions. This book publishes open-access compositional data obtained from laser ablation – inductively coupled plasma – mass spectrometry, from a single analytical laboratory, providing a uniquely comparative data set. The geographic range includes studies of beads produced in Europe and traded widely across North America and beads from South and Southeast Asia traded around the Indian Ocean and beyond. The contributors provide new insight on the timing of interregional interactions, technologies of bead production and patterns of trade and exchange, using glass beads as a window to the past. This volume will be a key reference for glass researchers, archaeologists, and any scholars interested in material culture and exchange; it provides a wide range of case studies in the investigation and interpretation of glass bead composition, production and exchange since ancient times.
This book provides a comprehensive research on Ancient Indian glass. The contributors include experienced archaeologists of South Asian glass and archaeological chemists with expertise in the chemical analysis of glass, besides, established ethnohistorians and ethnoarchaeologists. It is comprised of five sections, and each section discusses different aspects of glass study: the origin of glass and its evolution, its scientific study and its care, ancient glass in literature and glass ethnography, glass in South Asia and the diffusion of glass in different parts of the world. The topic covered by the different chapters ranges from the development of faience, to the techniques developed for the manufacture of glass beads, glass bangles or glass mirrors at different times in south Asia, a major glass producing region and the regional distribution of key artefacts both within India and outside the region, in Africa, Europe or Southeast Asia. Some chapters also include extended examples of the archaeometry of ancient glasses. It makes an important contribution to archaeological, anthropological and analytical aspects of glass in South Asia. As such, it represents an invaluable resource for students through academic and industry researchers working in archaeological sciences, ancient knowledge system, pyrotechnology, historical archaeology, social archaeology and student of anthropology and history with an interest in glass and the archaeology of South Asia.
English translation of the Chinese publication Si chou zhi lu shang de gu dai bo li yan jiu, proceedings of the 2004 Urumqi Symposium on Ancient Glass in Northern China and the 2005 Shanghai International Workshop of Archaeology of Glass, with the addition of some new information and six previously unpublished papers presented at the International Congress on Glass held in Kyoto, Japan in 2004.
Beneath the modern skyscrapers of Singapore lie the remains of a much older trading port, prosperous and cosmopolitan and a key node in the maritime Silk Road. This book synthesizes 25 years of archaeological research to reconstruct the 14th-century port of Singapore in greater detail than is possible for any other early Southeast Asian city. The picture that emerges is of a port where people processed raw materials, used money, and had specialized occupations. Within its defensive wall, the city was well organized and prosperous, with a cosmopolitan population that included residents from China, other parts of Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Fully illustrated, with more than 300 maps and colour photos, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea presents Singapore's history in the context of Asia's long-distance maritime trade in the years between 1300 and 1800: it amounts to a dramatic new understanding of Singapore's pre-colonial past.
This comprehensive and absorbing book traces the cultural history of Southeast Asia from prehistoric (especially Neolithic, Bronze-Iron age) times through to the major Hindu and Buddhist civilizations, to around AD 1300. Southeast Asia has recently attracted archaeological attention as the locus for the first recorded sea crossings; as the region of origin for the Austronesian population dispersal across the Pacific from Neolithic times; as an arena for the development of archaeologically-rich Neolithic, and metal using communities, especially in Thailand and Vietnam, and as the backdrop for several unique and strikingly monumental Indic civilizations, such as the Khmer civilization centred around Angkor. Southeast Asia is invaluable to anyone interested in the full history of the region.
While scholars have long documented the migration of people in ancient and medieval times, they have paid less attention to those who traveled across borders with some regularity. This study of early transnational relations explores the routine interaction of people across the boundaries of empires, tribal confederacies, kingdoms, and city-states, paying particular attention to the role of long-distance trade along the Silk Road and maritime trade routes. It examines the obstacles voyagers faced, including limited travel and communication capabilities, relatively poor geographical knowledge, and the dangers of a fragmented and shifting political landscape, and offers profiles of better-known transnational elites such as the Hellenic scholar Herodotus and the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, as well lesser known servants, merchants, and sailors. By revealing the important political, economic, and cultural role cross-border trade and travel played in ancient society, this work demonstrates that transnationalism is not unique to modern times. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
The Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology focuses on the material culture and lifeways of the peoples of prehistoric and early historic East and Southeast Asia; their origins, behavior and identities as well as their biological, linguistic and cultural differences and commonalities. Emphasis is placed upon the interpretation of material culture to illuminate and explain social processes and relationships as well as behavior, technology, patterns and mechanisms of long-term change and chronology, in addition to the intellectual history of archaeology as a discipline in this diverse region. The Handbook augments archaeologically-focused chapters contributed by regional scholars by providing histories of research and intellectual traditions, and by maintaining a broadly comparative perspective. Archaeologically-derived data are emphasized with text-based documentary information, provided to complement interpretations of material culture. The Handbook is not restricted to art historical or purely descriptive perspectives; its geographical coverage includes the modern nation-states of China, Mongolia, Far Eastern Russia, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor.