This book analyses a group of Buddhist sculptures from ancient Southeast Asia, putting them into their historical, religious, and artistic context and then traces their relationship with art from India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
This book analyses a group of Buddhist sculptures from ancient Southeast Asia, putting them into their historical, religious, and artistic context and then traces their relationship with art from India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
This book analyses a group of Buddhist sculptures from ancient Southeast Asia, putting them into their historical, religious, and artistic context and then traces their relationship with art from India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
This volume is the first tangible result of an international project initiated by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) with the aim of compiling a bibliographic database documenting publications on South and Southeast Asian art and archaeology. The bibliographic information, over 1,300 records extracted from the database, forms the principal part of this publication. It is preceded by a list of periodicals consulted and followed by three types of indexes which help users to find their way in the ABIA South and Southeast Asian Art and Archaeology Index (ABIA Index). The detailed bibliographic descriptions, controlled keywords and many elucidating annotations make this reference work into an indispensable guide to recent scholarly work on the prehistory and arts of South/Southeast Asia.
This book breaks new ground by examining trans-oceanic connectivity through the perspective of coastal shrines and maritime cultural landscapes across the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. It covers a period of expanding networks and cross-cultural encounters from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. The book examines the distinctiveness of these shrines, and highlights their interconnections, and their role in social integration in South and Southeast Asia. By drawing on data from shipwreck sites, the author elaborates on the material and religious intersections and transmissions between cultures across the seas. Many of these coastal shrines survived into the colonial period when they came to be admired for their aesthetic value as ‘monuments’. As nation states of the region became independent, these shrines were often inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List on account of their Outstanding Universal Values. The book argues that in the 21st century there is a need to promote the cultural connectivity of the past as transnational heritage on UNESCO’s global platform to preserve and protect our shared heritage. The volume will be essential reading for academics and researchers of archaeology, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, history of South and Southeast Asia, religious studies, cultural studies, and Asian studies.
This volume challenges existing notions of what is “Indian,” “Southeast Asian,” and/or “South Asian” art to help educators present a more contextualized understanding of art in a globalized world. In doing so, it (re)examines how South or Southeast Asian art is being made, exhibited, circulated and experienced in new ways in the United States or in regions under its cultural hegemony. The essays presented in this book examine both historical and contemporary transformations or lived experiences of monuments and regional styles (sites) from South or Southeast Asian art in art making, subsequent usage, and exhibition-making under the rubric of “Indian,” “South Asian,” “or “Southeast Asian” Art.
FROM THE AWARD-WINNING, BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CO-HOST OF THE CHART-TOPPING EMPIRE PODCAST – A REVOLUTIONARY NEW HISTORY OF THE DIFFUSION OF INDIAN IDEAS 'A master storyteller' Sunday Times 'Richly woven, highly readable ... Written with passion and verve' Spectator 'A more masterful and accessible survey ... would be hard to find ... Enthralling' Literary Review India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it. Praise for William Dalrymple and The Anarchy 'A superb historian with a visceral understanding of India' The Times 'Magnificently readable, deeply researched and richly atmospheric' Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday
This book takes stock of the results of some two decades of intensive archaeological research carried out on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, in combination with renewed approaches to textual sources and to art history. To improve our understanding of the trans-cultural process commonly referred to as Indianisation, it brings together specialists of both India and Southeast Asia, in a fertile inter-disciplinary confrontation. Most of the essays reappraise the millennium-long historiographic no-man's land during which exchanges between the two shores of the Bay of Bengal led, among other processes, to the Indianisation of those parts of the region that straddled the main routes of exchange. Some essays follow up these processes into better known "classical" times or even into modern times, showing that the localisation process of Indian themes has long remained at work, allowing local societies to produce their own social space and express their own ethos.
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.