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Events Archive

2021 - 2017 (Last updated: August 2021)

2021 Past Event Calendar

August 25, 2021
Skye VanValkenburgh

The Narrative of the Buddha’s Life in Gandharan Art Between Storytelling and Performance

Lecture: Center for Buddhist Studies: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | February 19 | 2-4 p.m. |  Online Zoom Webinar

Speaker: Pia Brancaccio, Professor of Art History, Drexel University

Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies

In the Kushan period (1st- 3rd c. CE) Gandharan artists created a large body of narrative sculpture depicting the Buddha’s life story in a chronological and sequential manner. The Buddha’s actions in these pictorial narratives display a dramatic and cohesive thread that has no precedents in Indian art. The lecture intends to explore how this radically new way of narrating the Buddha’s life in Gandharan art may have been informed by modes of representations established in theatre. Textual and visual evidence speak for the early development of Sanskrit theatre and Buddhist drama in the Northwest of the Indian Subcontinent in the first centuries CE. Recent archaeological discoveries from Swat, Pakistan show how images associated with western theatrical performances were seamlessly integrated within the decoration of Buddhist stupas. All of the above evidence suggests that the performative tradition may have played a key role in the process of formulation and codification of Buddhist narrative art in the region.

Speaker: Pia Brancaccio is a Professor of Art History at Drexel University. Her research focuses on Buddhist art from South Asia, where she has traveled extensively. Her most recent publications include a monograph entitled The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad: Transformations in Art and Religion (Brill, 2010) and edited volumes entitled Living Rock: Buddhist, Hindu and Jain Cave Temples in Western Deccan (Marg, 2013) and Gandharan Buddhism: Archaeology, Art and Text with K. Behrendt (UBC Press 2006).

Gandharan Buddhist Reliquaries and Gandharan Buddhism

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | March 12 | 2-4 p.m. |  Online Zoom Webinar

Speaker: Richard Salomon, Emeritus Professor of Asian Languages and Literature and William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor Emeritus, University of Washington

Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies

Speaker: Richard Salomon (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 1975) is Emeritus Professor of Asian Languages and Literature and William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. He is the former president of the International Association of Buddhist Studies and of the American Oriental Society, and since 1996 the director of the University of Washington’s Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project.

Professor Salomon’s specialties include Sanskrit language and literature, Indian Buddhist literature and textual studies, Indian epigraphy and paleography, Gāndhārī language and Gandhāran studies, and the world history of writing. He has published seven books and over 150 articles in these and other fields, including Indian Epigraphy (1998), Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhāra (1999), Two Gāndhārī Manuscripts of the “Songs of Lake Anavatapta” (2008), and Buddhist Literature from Ancient Gandhāra (2018).

Where was wine drunk in Gandhara? New Insights into Reveling Scenes in the light of a Stylistic Analysis

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | April 16 | 12-2 p.m. |  Online Zoom Webinar

Speaker: Jessie Pons, Junior Professor South Asian History of Religion, Center for Religious Studies (CERES) CERES, Ruhr Universität Bochum

Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies

This presentation will outline some of the results of research on the identification and characterization of Gandharan sculptural styles and highlight how a traditional stylistic analysis can contribute to broader questions about Gandharan art, from the provenance of the artefacts to the signification of the scenes they represent. As a preamble, it will present the methodological approach underlying the stylistic study and sketch a map of the sculptural languages circumscribed across Gandhara. It will subsequently examine a case-study – the depiction of reveling scenes – and illustrate how an emphasis on patterns of geographic distribution may add to the discussion on phenomena of cultural and religion interaction in the region. It will further show how attention to formal and iconographic variations can – perhaps predictably – inform us on the provenance of pieces found outside of archaeological contexts and thereby invite to reflect on the methodological frameworks within which we approach these variations.

Speaker: Jessie Pons studied art history, Indian studies, and museum studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, École du Louvre, and the University of Paris from which she earned her Ph.D. in 2011 with a thesis on Gandharan Buddhist art. Since 2010, she has been affiliated with the Centre for Religious Studies in Ruhr Universität Bochum and was appointed Junior-Professor for South Asian History of Religions in 2016. Her research focuses on the interplay between material objects, textual traditions and religious experiences and she has been involved in several projects for the digital documentation and preservation of Buddhist artefacts.

Prophecy in Time and Place: Reading “The Prophecy of the Arhat of Khotan” as a Ring Composition

Colloquium: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | May 5 | 12-2 p.m. |  Online Zoom Webinar

Speaker: Meghan Howard, Ph.D. Candidate, Group in Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

“The Prophecy of the Arhat of Khotan” presents a prophecy of the demise of the Dharma in Central Asia, following the fortunes of a group of monks who are exiled from a series of Central Asian states, Tibet, and Gandhāra before finally slaughtering each other in Kauśāmbī. One of the well-known set of Tibetan texts on Khotan, “The Prophecy” has been studied by scholars for well over a century. Yet existing studies have largely mined these sources for Khotanese and Tibetan historical data. In this presentation, I ask, What can we learn when we approach the text on its own terms? Analyzing the literary structure of “The Prophecy” reveals the clarity and coherence of what can otherwise appear to be an unwieldy narrative. And by considering this structure within the historical context that produced it, I am able to shed light on the narrative’s rhetorical import with implications for our understanding of ninth-century Tibetan and Khotanese history. By demonstrating the interpretative power—including for data-mining projects—of simply reading Silk Road texts as products of a specific time and place, this presentation encourages scholars to expand and re-center our approach to the Tibetan texts on Khotan and to Dunhuang materials in general.

Speaker: Meghan Howard holds a B.A. in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies from Harvard University (2004). Her work as a Tibetan translator and interpreter led her to Songtsen Library in Dehradun, India, where she spent four years working on a translation project involving Dunhuang materials related to the history of Tibet's imperial period (7th to 9th centuries). Her research interests center on cultural and religious exchanges between Tibet and neighboring peoples from the imperial period through the fourteenth century. She is currently writing a dissertation on Facheng 法成/Chödrup (Chos grub, d. c. 860), an influential Buddhist monk and translator of Buddhist scriptures from Chinese to Tibetan and vice versa in the important Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang.

A lost Buddhist sect at Dunhuang—the Three Levels Movement in the Dunhuang Documents

Colloquium: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | May 12 | 2-4 p.m. |  Online Zoom Webinar

Speaker/Performer: Max Brandstadt, Ph.D. Candidate, Group in Buddhist Studies, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

The Dunhuang documents, discovered in the early 1900s at the Mogao cave complex on the Chinese outskirts of the Silk Road, revolutionized our understanding of the development of Buddhism in China. One of the many surprises contained in the Dunhuang manuscript cache was the discovery of a substantial number of texts by the so-called ‘Three Levels Movement,’ a mysterious Buddhist sect that flourished during the sixth and seventh centuries of the common era, and then vanished. This talk will provide a sketch of this oft-misunderstood group—their practices, institutions, and beliefs—through the lens of relevant manuscripts preserved at Dunhuang.

Speaker: Max Brandstadt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Group in Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley, specializing in the history of medieval Chinese Buddhism. He is currently writing his dissertation on the development of the Three Levels Movement and its influence on later Chan and Pure Land Buddhism. He will be a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows beginning Fall 2021.

2020 Event Calendar

August 24, 2021
Skye VanValkenburgh

Does cultural interaction foment cultural change?: A case study from the proto-Silk Road in northwestern China

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | February 20 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall

Speaker: Andrew Womack, Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University

Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

More than 2000 years before the development of the historical Silk Road, people living in what is now northwestern China were participating in long-distance exchange networks that brought them new goods and technologies from both the Central Asian steppe and eastern China. These included domesticates such as wheat, barley, sheep, and cattle, as well as bronze working, jade carving, and pyromantic divination. Many scholars have viewed these as transformational technologies, that, along with immigration and climate change, led to the development of a completely new cultural tradition around 2200BC. However, the results of recent fieldwork in the Tao River Valley of Gansu Province point to a much more complex relationship with these new technologies, one that involved a nuanced mixture of adoption, adaptation, and rejection. This presentation will explore these new findings and the impact they have on our understanding of cultural change across early China.

Andrew Womack is currently a postdoctoral scholar in Chinese Archaeology at the Stanford Archaeology Center. He is Associate Director of the Tao River Archaeology Project in Gansu Province, China, where his research utilizes geophysical survey, excavation, and ceramic analysis to explore identity and interaction during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age.

Lives and Deaths of Eastern Europe’s Map Men after 1919

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | March 2 | 5-6:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speaker: Steven Seegel, Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian History, University of Northern Colorado

Sponsors: Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of transnational projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. Map Men takes a detailed look at the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind the historical dramas of a long continuum of world war and revolution in East Central Europe. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men re-creates the public and private worlds of mapmakers who interacted with and influenced one another, even as they played key roles in defining and fearing borders, territories, peoples, and nations­—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars.

Silk, gold, and glass: Upper Mustang and Nepal and the Silk Roads after 400 CE

Lecture: Center for Buddhist Studies: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | March 5 | 5-7 p.m. | 315 Wheeler Hall

Speaker: Mark Aldenderfer, Distinguished Professor and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair, UC Merced

Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Himalayan studies at UC Berkeley, Institute for South Asia Studies, Center for Buddhist Studies

The high Himalayan valley of Upper Mustang today appears isolated and remote. But more than 1600 years ago, the settlements of Upper Mustang participated in an extensive trade network that ultimately connected them to the fabled Silk Road. Not only did exotic objects find their way in to the region, but new ideas and religious practices appeared in mortuary rites and rituals and which reflect a complex blend of pre-Buddhist and possibly Zoroastrian influences. The archaeological evidence supporting these claims is explored in this presentation.

Mark Aldenderfer is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Merced. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of high altitude cultural and biological adaptations from an archaeological perspective. He has worked on the three high elevation plateaus of the planet—Ethiopian, Andean, and Tibetan—over the course of his career and currently works in Upper Mustang, Nepal, where he studies long-term patterns of population movements, trade, and the transformation of religious traditions over the past 2000 years.

The Ecology of Mobility in the Eurasian Steppes: 2020 Tang Conference in Silk Road Studies

Conference: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | December 11 | 9-2 p.m. | Online Zoom Webinar

Panel 1

9-11am

Animal Style Art as a Signal of Religious Affiliation
Kathryn MacFarland, Arizona State Museum

The Continuity and the Change of Uyghur Rulers’ Legitimation
Yukiyo Kasai, Ruhr University, Bochum (Germany)

The Great Game on the Silk Road
Bryan K. Miller, University of Michigan

Discussant: James Lankton, UCL/UC Berkeley


Panel 2
12pm-2pm

Glacial Archaeology and High Altitude Prehistory in the Mongolian Steppe
William Taylor, University of Colorado Museum of Natural History

Before the Silk Roads
Alicia Ventresca Miller, University of Michigan

The Archaeology Behind Genetic Ancestries of Central Eurasia
Michael Frachetti, Washington University in St. Louis

Discussant: Andrew Womack, Furman University

2019 Event Calendar

August 23, 2021
Skye VanValkenburgh

From the Upper Indus to the East Coast of China: On the Origin of the Pictorial Representation of the Lotus Sūtra

Lecture: Center for Buddhist Studies: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | January 30 | 5-7 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speaker/Performer: Haiyan Hu-von Hinüber, Peking University

Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)

In Chinese Buddhist art, there is an image of two sitting Buddhas, Śākyamuni and Prabhūtaratna, which can be traced back to the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra. Because (until 2012) no image of the “Two Sitting Buddhas” had been found outside China, it has been assumed that the depiction of this pair of Buddhas is of Chinese origins. Drawing on four images that have been discovered since 2012, this talk will argue that the depiction of the “Two Sitting Buddhas” originated in the ancient Indian cultural area and then spread along the Silk Road to China.

Trained in Indology and Buddhist Studies in China (Peking University, MA) and Germany (Göttingen, PhD), Haiyan Hu-von Hinüber has held professorial appointments, teaching and serving as research scholar at the universities of Freiburg, Copenhagen, Vienna and Erfurt. She has also been visiting scholar in France, Japan and China, and she has served as Professor-at-large at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, Shandong-University (China). Recently she has served as senior researcher at Shenzhen-University (China), and currently she is attached in the same capacity to the Center of Buddhist Studies, Peking University.

Mongol ‘Translations’ of a Nepalese Stupa: Architectural Replicas and the Cult of Bodnāthe Stūpa/Jarung khashar in Mongolia

Lecture: Center for Buddhist Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | February 21 | 5-6:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speaker/Performer: Isabelle Charleux, CNRS, Paris

Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Mongolia Initiative, Center for Buddhist Studies

The cult of the Nepalese stupa of Bodnath (Tib. and Mo. Jarung Khashor) was very popular in 19th and early 20th century Mongolia and especially in Buryatia, as testifies the translation into Mongolian of a famous guidebook to Bodnath, a corpus of Mongolian oral narratives, the many thang-kas and amulets depicting the Bodnath Stupa along with a Tibetan prayer, and the existence of architectural replicas in Mongolia, probably to create surrogate pilgrimages to Bodnath. I will focus on these architectural replicas and try to explain how the Nepalese architecture was ‘translated’ to Mongolia, and try to understand whether the differences between the original and the replicas are due to local techniques and materials, to the impossibility of studying the original, or to the distortions induced by their mode of transmission. Has the original building been reinterpreted to the point of transforming its meaning? Is the replica of an architecture accompanied by the replica of possible cultic practices associated with it?

Isabelle Charleux is director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris) and deputy director of the GSRL (Group Societies, Religions, Laicities, National Centre for Scientific Research – Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes-PSL, Paris). Her research interests focus on Mongol material culture and religion. She published Nomads on Pilgrimage. Mongols on Wutaishan (China), 1800-1940 (Brill, 2015) and Temples et monastères de Mongolie-Intérieure (Paris, 2006), as well as scholarly articles on various topics such as miraculous icons in in Mongolia, Inner Mongolian mural paintings, and visual representation of past and present figures of authority in the Mongol world.

Points of Transition: Ovoo and the Ritual Remaking of Religious, Ecological, and Historical Politics in Inner Asia

Conference/Symposium: Center for Buddhist Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | February 22 | 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative, Townsend Center for the Humanities

Ovoo, the structures of stones, trees, scarves, skulls, steering wheel covers, and a staggering array of other objects that are ubiquitous across the landscape of contemporary Mongolia, Buryatia, Inner Mongolia, and Qinghai, have long marked sites where ritual, though often highly spontaneous, practices invoke the presence of immanent relations. Built and maintained by various publics, gatherings at ovoo have over past centuries been major sites of political action, where the identities of and relationships between more and less local shamans, lamas, imperial officials, businesspeople, bureaucrats, politicians, and nonhumans are narrated, contested, and re-defined. At the same time, ovoo are often engaged individually, by travelers engaging roadside ovoo or at places generally unspoken of to others and not visible on the wider landscape, that are especially significant to an individual or intimate group. Scholars from the US, Europe, and Asia will be discussing such issues as how these sites are useful in juxtaposing historical and political narratives, ecological and environmentalist movements, religious practice, and the productive logics of households, businesses, and states.

Calculation and Cosmography: Formal Continuities in Buddhist Art along the Gansu Corridor, from Dunhuang to Labrang Monastery

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | March 13 | 5-7 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speaker/Performer: Jon Soriano, UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

While the art history of the overland silk road seems distinguished by its continual flux, as disparate visual regimes flowed in and out over the centuries, the art in question is also marked by strong formal continuities specific to its regions, as well as certain adaptations to global paradigms. This talk adopts Kublerian concepts of 'shape' and 'sequence' to identify a formal series instantiated by a range of Buddhist objects and sites, a series structured by an underlying drive toward exactitude. Objects in this series are concatenated from recent fieldwork at a variety of sites along the silk road in western China, primarily around Gansu and Qinghai Provinces. These sites include early and later Dunhuang caves, the 18th century architecture at Labrang Monastery, and various places in between. Positing such a continuity may help shape a larger concept of Buddhist art history.

Jon Soriano is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art department at UC Berkeley, working with his advisor Pat Berger on a dissertation regarding the material culture of the Kālacakra tantra between the Gelugpa Gaden Phodrang and the Qing court. Jon has master's degrees in Asian Studies and Ethnology, and has worked for the National Palace Museum in Taipei and the Berkeley Art Museum. He is the current recipient of the Dallan and Karen Leong Clancy Fund for Silk Road Studies, as well as funding from the Dunhuang Foundation.

Visual bilingualism and the funerary space: Keys to understanding the spatial semiotics of Central Asian tombs in 6th century China

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | April 17 | 5-7 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speaker/Performer: Pénélope Riboud, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU

Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)

The dominant religion of pre-Islamic Sogdiana was a local form of Zoroastrianism, and this has led most scholars to assume a correlation with the religious beliefs and practices within the Sogdian community settled in China. And indeed, many aspects of these tombs show that Central Asian funerary practices were maintained. However, some aspects of “Sino-Sogdian” tombs, such as the treatment of the corpses, the spatial organization of the tomb and the visual repertoire remain puzzling within the frame of any specific religious belief. These “discordances” have often been interpreted as compromises, and mere consequences of the need to adapt to a complex cultural environment. This talk will investigate these hidden funerary riddles, in order to understand what they tell us about the tomb’s owner, his beliefs and moreover, what were the deliberate strategies engaged to build a bilingual iconographic program that fits in both Chinese and Sogdian narratives of the after world.

Pénélope Riboud, an Assistant Professor of Chinese History and Art History at Inalco in Paris, is a historian and an art historian who focuses on the society and visual culture of Medieval China. She was trained in France as a historian and an archaeologist at Université Paris 1- Panthéon Sorbonne, then as a sinologist at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco-Langues’O) in Paris where she received her PhD in 2008. She is currently spending a year as Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.

New Discoveries in East and Southeast Asian Archaeology

Panel Discussion: Center for Chinese Studies: Center for Korean Studies: Center for Japanese Studies: Institute of East Asian Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies: Center for Southeast Asia Studies | April 29 | 3-5 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speakers: Peter V. Lape, Anthropology and Curator of Archaeology, Burke Museum, University of Washington; John W. Olsen, Regents’ Professor Emeritus & Executive Director, Je Tsongkhapa Endowment for Central and Inner Asian Archaeology, Anthropology, University of Arizona

Panelist/Discussant: Gyoung-Ah Lee, Anthropology, University of Oregon

Moderator: Junko Habu, Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Department of Anthropology, Archaeological Research Facility, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), Center for Korean Studies (CKS), Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

This event celebrates the publication of the Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology by inviting two editors of this volume, both of whom are prominent scholars in the field of Asian Archaeology. Prof. John W. Olsen (University of Arizona) will talk about his recent archaeological expeditions in Mongolia and Tibet with a focus on Paleolithic archaeology in these regions. Professor Peter V. Lape (University of Washington) will discuss social change in Island Southeast Asia over the past 5000 years. 

Mithra, Buddha, and Mani Walk into a Desert...: Indo-Iranian and Sino-Iranian Encounters in Central Asia

Conference/Symposium: Center for Buddhist Studies: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | May 3 – 4, 2019 every day | 10 a.m.-3:30 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Sponsors: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies

All panels held at 180 Doe Library (*except where indicated)

Friday May 3, 10am–12:00pm
Introductory Remarks
Sanjyot Mehendale, UC Berkeley

Changing Vocabulary of Manichaean Visual Syntax in Uyghur East Central Asia
Zsuzsanna Gulácsi, Northern Arizona University

Manichaean Official Documents in their Central Asian Context
Adam Benkato, UC Berkeley

Manichaean Evidence for Kushan Buddhism
Jason BeDuhn, Northern Arizona University

Friday, May 3, 1:30–3:30 pm
Buddhist Sogdian Interconfessional Space: Remarks from Art and Textual Evidence
Barakatullo Ashurov, Harvard University

Indo-Iranian, Perso-Buddhist, and Sino-Iranian Entanglements: Imaging Religion and Royal Power at the End of Antiquity
Matthew Canepa, UC Irvine

Itinerant Kingship, Buddhist Monasteries, and the Making of a Kushan Royal Cult
Sanjyot Mehendale, UC Berkeley

*Friday, May 3, 5:15–7:00 pm
SPECIAL EVENT IN COLLABORATION WITH CAL PERFORMANCES AND THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE
Morrison Room, Doe Library

Heroes Take Their Stands: Milestones on the Silk Road
Ahmad Sadri, Lake Forest College

Sug-e Siavosh (Mourning for Siavosh)
Soroor Ghanimati, UC Berkeley

Electra, a Sonic Heroine
Duncan MacRae, UC Berkeley

Saturday, May 4, 10:00–12 noon
Wind and Fire: Some Shared Motifs in Indo-Iranian and Sino-Iranian Settings
Jenny Rose, Claremont Graduate University

Greek Helios or Indian Surya?: Evolution of the Sun God’s Iconography from India to Bamiyan and Dunhuang
Osmund Bopearachchi, UC Berkeley

Two Ascetics between Gandhara and Dunhuang and Back: Transformations in the Depiction of the Śyāmaand the Dīpaṃkara Jātakas
Jessie Pons, Ruhr-University Bochum

Saturday, May 4, 1:30–4:00 pm
Recent Fieldwork at the Site of Kuh-e Khwaja, Sistan, Iran
Soroor Ghanimati, UC Berkeley

Khotan and Rawak Vihara on the Southern Silk Road, 3rd to 8th Centuries
Ulf Jäger, University of Leipzig

Non-Buddhist Religious Icons in the Mural Paintings of Early Buddhist Caves in Kucha and Dunhuang
Satomi Hiyama, Kyoto University

Iconography without Texts in Yulin Cave 3
Michelle McCoy, University of Pittsburgh

Ancient Amazons: Warrior Women in Myth, Art, and Archaeology

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | October 2 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall

Speaker/Performer: Adrienne Mayor, Stanford University

Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)

Fierce Amazons are featured in some of the most famous Greek myths.
Every great hero, from Heracles to Achilles, battled these powerful warrior queens.
But were Amazons real? Join Adrienne Mayor as she recounts tales of women warriors and uncovers some realities behind the myths. Archaeological discoveries of battle-scarred female skeletons buried with weapons now confirm that warlike women were not mere figments of the Greek imagination. Combining classical literature and art, nomad traditions, and archaeology, this illustrated lecture reveals how historical horsewomen-archers of the steppes influenced ideas and images of the warriors known to the ancient Greeks as Amazons.

Adrienne Mayor is a research scholar in the Classics Department and History and Philosophy of Science Program, Stanford University. Her books include The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World; The First Fossil Hunters; a biography of Mithradates, The Poison King (National Book Award nonfiction finalist); and Gods and Robots.

Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textile Images

Lecture: Institute of East Asian Studies: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | October 7 | 5 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speaker: Mariachiara Gasparini, San Jose State University

Moderator: Joyce Ertel Hulbert, Textile Conservator

Sponsors: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS), Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley Mongolia Initiative

In her book "Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles," author Mariachiara Gasparini investigates the origin and effects of a textilemediated visual culture that developed at the heart of the Silk Road between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. Through the analysis of the Turfan Textile Collection in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin and more than a thousand textiles held in collections worldwide, Gasparini discloses and reconstructs the rich cultural entanglements along the Silk Road, between the coming of Islam and the rise of the Mongol Empire, from the Tarim to Mediterranean Basin.

Exploring in detail the iconographic transfer between different agents and different media from Central Asian caves to South Italian churches, the author depicts and describes the movement and exchange of portable objects such as sculpture, wall painting, and silk fragments across the Asian continent and across the ages. Gasparini’s history offers critical perspectives that extend far beyond an outmoded notion of “Silk Road studies.” Her cross-media work shows readers how
certain material cultures are connected not only by the physical routes they take but also because of the meanings and interpretations these objects engage in various places. "Transcending Patterns" is at once art history, material and visual cultural history, Asian studies, conservatory studies, and linguistics.

MARIACHIARA GARSPARINI received a Ph.D. in transcultural studies and global art history from Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research focuses on Central Asian material culture, wall painting, artist’s praxis, and Sino-Iranian and Turko-Mongol interactions. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Asia. Since 2015 she has been teaching Asian art in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Life at the Border: Farmers and Nomads at the Edges of the Bukhara Oasis during Antiquity

Lecture: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | October 22 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall

Speaker/Performer: Sören Stark, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU

Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

The oasis of Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan was a major node in the network of ancient and medieval communication lines across Eurasia, located at an important crossroad where routes between eastern Iran and Samarqand met with routes which ran between Bactria/Tokharistan (and India) and Lake Aral and further on to eastern Europe. Archaeological and historical studies on this region have long focused on its urban centers. In his lecture, Professor Stark will instead highlight rural society at the border of the oasis, drawing attention to those who sustained and complemented urban centers in the oasis during antiquity. For this he will draw from the results of ongoing fieldwork at a number of sites in the ancient border zone of the Bukhara oasis dating to the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic period. They show a dazzling picture of economic and social interactions evolving in complex agro-pastoral lifestyles. And they show that the seemingly 'small' world of communities at the edges of the oasis was nonetheless well connected with the big world of the ancient “Silk Roads.”

Sören Stark received his doctorate in 2005 with a study on the archaeology and history of the pre-Muslim Turks in Central and Inner Asia. Hi current research interests are, among others, on Hellenistic and Late Antique/Early Medieval Sogdiana and the archaeology and history of nomadic groups close to oasis territories in Western Central Asia. His publications include a monograph on the archaeology of the 6th-8th century Türks in Inner and Central Asia, an exhibition catalogue on Early Iron Age kurgans from Kazakhstan, and numerous articles and book chapters on the history and archaeology of Sogdiana between the Hellenistic and the Islamic periods. He has been co-editor of the Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology (at Brepols) and is currently co-editor of Brill's Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8: Uralic & Central Asian Studies (HO8).

2019 Annual Tang Lecture: Over Mountains and Steppes: Tracing ancient tracks of Asia’s Silk Roads

Lecture: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | November 15 | 5-7 p.m. | Alumni House, Toll Room

Speaker/Performer: Michael Frachetti, Washington University in St. Louis

Sponsor: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

For over a century, the Silk Road was depicted by camel caravans crossing barren deserts, transporting exotic commodities to oasis cities across Central Asia and beyond. The harsh grasslands of the Eurasian steppe and the soaring peaks of Inner Asia were seen as barriers to this flow of Asian commerce — risky regions to be crossed quickly or avoided altogether. Yet new archaeological research in the steppes and highlands of Central Asia has suprisingly changed this canonical picture, showing far greater antiquity of human interaction and interregional connectivity than ever known, and tracing the earliest links along the proto-Silk Road to 5000 years old sites in the mountains of Kazakhstan. This paper traces nearly 20 years of archaeological fieldwork by the author, highlighting new site discoveries and the high-tech methods used at sites from the Bronze Age and later historical periods that reshape our understanding the Silk Road from its earliest formation to the time of its decline.

Michael Frachetti is Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. His work addresses how economic and political strategies served to shape inter-regional networks across Asia as early as 3000 BC (the Early Bronze Age) and how those networks laid the foundation for the later Silk Roads. He conducts archaeological field research in Eastern Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He is the author of Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia (UCPress, 2008) and a forthcoming book entitled Ancient Inner Asia (Cambridge Univ. Press).

First Step(pe)s: The Silk Road from a Steppe Perspective

Lecture: Mongolia Initiative: Tang Center for Silk Road Studies | December 4 | 5-7 p.m. | 370 Dwinelle Hall

Speaker/Performer: Ursula B. Brosseder, Bonn University

Sponsor: Institute of East Asian Studies (IEAS)

Numerous, far-reaching migrations and contacts have taken place during prehistory across the vast Eurasian steppes, reaching from Eastern Europe or the Near East to Inner Asia and present-day China. However, the intensity and speed of connectivity between East and West changed profoundly in the late first millennium BC. Traditional narrative holds that this change was initiated by the travels of Zhang Qian in 138 BC which is seen as the “foundation” of the Silk Roads. In the present lecture I will dive deeper into the dynamics of power politics in the steppes of that time period and show how archaeology reveals existing steppe networks and how they contributed to the East-West exchanges we know from the literary sources. Integrating archaeological and textual sources leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the processes and dynamics of interaction across Eurasia.

Ursula B. Brosseder received her PhD in 2001 from the Freie Universität in Berlin on the Early Iron Age in Europe. After a research stay with a fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Novosibirsk, Siberia, she shifted her research focus on Eurasian Archaeology and the Archaeology of Mongolia in particular where she has been conducting fieldwork since 2005. She is a specialist on Xiongnu Archaeology and their contacts and connectivity across the Eurasian steppes during the late Iron Age ("Silk Roads"). Her work has been supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where she was a member in the School for Historical Studies in 2013/2014.

2018 Event Calendar

December 3, 2018
Events, Multiple

Monday, December 3, 2018, 5 pm
The History and Science of Paper in Manuscripts of Central Asia
Agnieszka Helman-Ważny, University of Hamburg & University of Warsaw
180 Doe Memorial Library
UC Berkeley

Manuscripts from the Silk Road have been used as a key source in the study of religions, literature, and the cultural history of Central Asia. However, they have hardly ever been viewed as artifacts in their own right. As one of the most important physical features of a manuscript, paper serves as a means to distinguish one type of manuscript from another, and can help to determine the origin of a manuscript. This lecture, based on selected collections of paper and manuscripts found in the caves of Western Nepal, Tibet and Central Asia, surveys a variety of analytical techniques in comparison to codicological methods traditionally applied to manuscript studies. By broadening the scope of methods and ways of thinking, we may gain greater precision of temporal and regional attribution of excavated artifacts.

Agnieszka Helman-Ważny (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, and the Department of Books and Media History, Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies, University of Warsaw) is a paper scientist and the author or co-author of four books and over forty scholarly articles.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies.

Wednesday, October 24, 2018, 5pm

Buddhist Textiles Along the Silk Road
Mariachiara Gasparini, University of California Riverside
180 Doe Memorial Library
UC Berkeley

In the field of Buddhist Studies textual sources provide a fundamental ground to analyze and compare philosophical and religious contexts developed in various geographic areas of the larger Asian continent. However, as a non-verbal form of communication, textile material evidence and visual representation may offer a different intercultural perspective that clarifies Buddhist rituals, and monastic and laic lifestyles along the Silk Road. Developed from a larger ontological and interdisciplinary study that will be published in 2019, this paper presents a few case studies from the Turfan Textile Collection in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, and the Dunhuang Textile Collections in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Mariachiara Gasparini received her Ph.D. in Transcultural Studies: Global Art History from Heidelberg University, Germany. Her research focuses on Central Asian textiles, material culture, wall painting, artist's praxis, and Sino-Iranian and Turko-Mongol interactions. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian Art at the University of California Riverside. Her book Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textiles (7th-14th century) is forthcoming (Hawai'i 2019).

Sunday, October 7, 2018, 3pm
Delhi to Damascus
Sandeep Das and the HUM Ensemble
Hertz Hall
UC Berkeley

Tabla virtuoso and Grammy Award-winning member of the Silkroad Ensemble, Sandeep Das celebrates the vibrant cultural heritage shared by India and Syria in his latest project with the thrilling HUM Ensemble. Driving strummed strings, pulsating drums, hypnotic bowed drones, and soaring raga and maqam melodies rooted in Sufi poetry come together to connect ancient civilizations with modern virtuosity in Delhi to Damascus. Das is joined by Syrian oud master Issam Rafea, Indian vocalist and sarangi player Suhail Yusuf Khan, and sitar player Rajib Karmakar to explore centuries of classical and folk music that emerged along the winding trade road from Jaisalmer in India to Damascus in Syria.

The performance will be preceded by a lecture demonstration, at 2:00 pm. In this special pre-performance event, presented in association with the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, the artists will discuss musical traditions shared across cultures. The demonstration is free to ticket holders.

More information available here.

Tickets start at $54 and are available here.

Friday, September 28, 2018, 6pm

2018 Tang Lecture
Illustrations of the Parinirvāṇa Cycle in Kucha
Monika Zin, University of Leipzig, Germany
Toll Room, Alumni House
University of California, Berkeley

At least 100 caves in Kucha contain (or once contained) murals depicting scenes connected with the Buddha's death. The paintings are typically located in the rear part of the caves, in corridors behind the Buddha in the main niche. The illustrations begin with the episodes from the Buddha's last journey and end with the first council in Rājagṛha. It is solely through comparative analysis of the representations that it becomes possible to discern their programme. Through this programme, we discover the local beliefs these illustrations mirror, and the literary sources they illustrate. Interestingly, the arrangement of the murals in the corridors often follows the principles of symmetry, and not the chronology of the narrative, as if to create a “holy space” rather than to illustrate a chronology of events.

An expert on Indian and Central Asian Art, and Indian drama, Monika Zinbegan her academic career at the Jagiellon University in Cracow, Poland, in Theater Studies and Polish Language and Literature (M.A. in 1981). This was followed by a doctorate in Indology and Indian Art and post-doctoral studies (habilitation) in Indology at the LMU in Munich. In 2000, she joined the Department for Indology at the LMU Munich as an Associate Professor and also held a position as a Lecturer in Buddhist Art and Literature in the Department for Indology and Central Asian Sciences at the University of Leipzig from 2005 to 2008. From 2010-2014, she was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art History at the FU Berlin. She is currently a professor at the University of Leipzig working on a project entitled “Buddhist Murals of Kucha on the Northern Silk Road.”

Co-sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies.

Thursday, September 27, 2018, 5pm

Thangkas, Texts, and the Silk Route
Ann Shaftel, Dalhousie University
180 Doe Memorial Library
UC Berkeley

In a richly illustrated presentation on the challenges of applying conservation science to Buddhist sacred thangkas and texts, Ann Shaftel will include a discussion of the relationship between thangkas and texts, and the evolving function of thangkas in Buddhist philosophy, textural history and culture. The images accompanying her talk will feature Silk Route thangkas, and others from her 48 years of work in monasteries and museums.

Ann Shaftel's work is at the forefront in the field of thangka conservation worldwide. She is a renowned teacher of international workshops on the conservation of Buddhist treasures—in the US, Canada, Europe, Bhutan, Nepal, India and China. She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, and a Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation. Ann's international work in Treasure Caretaker Training won the prestigious Digital Empowerment Foundation's Chairman's Choice award.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies.

Friday-Saturday, May 4-5, 2018

Across the High Seas: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Indian Ocean Littoral 
Conference 
180 Doe Library

In the public imagination, the Silk Roads has become a catchall phrase to describe the overland and maritime exchange networks crisscrossing Eurasia, from the first Millennium BCE through (at least) the medieval period.

Although distinct patterns of long-distance exchange are attested to as early as the Bronze Age when, for example, lapis lazuli was exported by land and sea from the Indus Valley to the Near East, textual and archaeological research points to the turn of the Common Era as the period when the first institutionalized networks of maritime trade connecting what is now Europe to Africa and Asia were developed, concomitant with existing overland routes. These networks were defined by increased levels of interaction alongside the exchange of goods and ideas.

As scholars continue to explore and uncover particularities of the Eurasian networks, evidence suggests there is a need to reconfigure the monolithically imagined Silk Roads into smaller fragmented webs of economic, political and cultural exchanges, to locate those networks in time and space, and to study them as functioning both independently and interdependently.

This conference will highlight recent archaeological and historical research on some of the networks that operated across and around the Indian Ocean, and focus on the spatial configurations specific to maritime trade and the transformations of cultural and material artifacts as a result of those exchanges.

May 4 | 9:30am - 12:00pm
Spaces, Places, and Things: Spatiality in early Indian Ocean exchange
Eivind Heldaas Seland, University of Bergen 

Berenike's Role in the Ancient Maritime Silk Road Based on Results of Recent Excavations
Steven Sidebotham, University of Delaware 

Ancient Ties between China and East Africa
Chapurukha Kusimba, American University 

May 4 | 2:00pm - 4:30pm
Networks of Trade in the Indian Ocean: Spatial analysis in exchanged goods and cultural appropriation
Ariane de Saxcé, CNRS

Roman Glass in Asia: Where, When and Why
James Lankton, UCL

Indian Ocean Trade through Buddhist Iconographies 
Osmund Bopearachchi, CNRS/UC Berkeley 

May 5 | 9:30am - 12:30pm
Voyage and shipbuilding during the Maritime Silk Route's period
Jun Kimura, Tokai University

Reconstructing Demographics, Social Hierarchies and Ethnicity in Early Second-Millennium AD Port-Cities in the Malacca Straits Region
Derek Heng, Northern Arizona University 

Theorizing Maritime Space through Premodern Sino-Islamic Connections
Hyunhee Park, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Thursday, March 8, 2018, 5pm
Migrants, Monks, and Monasteries: Toward a History of South China Sea Buddhism
Jack Meng-Tat Chia, University of California, Berkeley/National University of Singapore
180 Doe Memorial Library

The event is co-sponsored by the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies and the Center for Buddhist Studies

Chinese migration since the nineteenth century have led to the spread of Buddhism to maritime Southeast Asia. Recently, scholars of Buddhism and historians of Chinese religions have begun to consider the connected history of Buddhism in China and Southeast Asia, using Buddhist records, epigraphic sources, as well as oral history interviews. In this talk, I explore the transregional Buddhist networks connecting Southeast China and the Chinese diaspora from the nineteenth century to 1949. I discuss how new patterns of Buddhist mobility contributed to the circulation of people, ideas, and resources across the South China Sea. I show that, on the one hand, Buddhist monks and religious knowledge moved along these networks from China to Southeast Asia, while money from wealthy overseas Chinese was channeled along the networks for temple building in China; on the other hand, Buddhist monks relied on the networks to support China's war effort and facilitate relocation to Southeast Asia during the Sino-Japanese War.

Jack Meng-Tat Chia is a Senior Tutor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore and currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Buddhist Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Born and raised in Singapore, he received his MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, and his PhD in History from Cornell University. He is currently working on his book manuscript, entitled Diaspora's Dharma: Buddhism and Modernity across the South China Sea. This book seeks to contribute to our understanding of the connected history of Buddhism in China and Southeast Asia.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018, 5pm
Reconfiguration of Ceramic Production and Trade in China at the Threshold of Global Trade:
An Archaeological Perspective 
Min Li, University of California, Los Angeles
180 Doe Memorial Library

Taking archaeological ceramics from production, transportation, and consumption sites during the 13th to 17th century, this paper examines the changing configuration of ceramic production and trade on Chinese coast during the critical transition from the Asiatic Trade Network to the beginning of early global trade. I will explore how potter communities in China linked to emerging maritime commercial enterprise adapt to the new demands and circumstances generated by early global trade and the expansion of Iberian colonial Enterprise by making innovations to their centuries old technological traditions. It will also explore the diverse ways that trade ceramics were incorporated into the local material culture as unfamiliar designs were brought to the potter communities in China and Chinese exports were brought to unfamiliar places along the global trade network.

Li, Min (Ph.D, University of Michigan, 2008) is an associate professor of East Asian archaeology with a joint appointment at Department of Anthropology and Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. His archaeological research spans from state formation in early China to early modern global trade network. He is also co-director of the landscape archaeology project in the Bronze Age city of Qufu, China. His first book Social Memory and State Formation in Early China is currently in production with Cambridge University Press and is scheduled to be released in March, 2018. He is working on his second book on the origin and dynamics of the Shang state in Bronze Age China.

2017 Event Calendar

December 6, 2017
Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

Wednesday, December 6, 2017, 5pm
Trans-Regionalism and Economic Co-Dependency across the South China Sea
Derek Thiam Soon Heng, Northern Arizona University
180 Doe Memorial Library


Throughout history, the South China Sea has been a maritime zone that saw primary economies of its littoral zones exercise influence over smaller, outlying economies by binding the latter into co-dependent relationships with the former. This may be witnessed in such areas as the currency systems adopted by the smaller economies, alignment of foreign and trade policies with those of the larger economies, and in the ways in which the trade of products from one economy to another was developed from being uni-directional and non-crucial, to being one where the economies became mutually dependent. This trans-regional economic phenomenon may be witnessed between China and the Malay Region during the tenth to fourteenth centuries. This paper seeks to explore the multi-facetted nature of the economic interaction between these two regional economies, and how a vertically integrated economic zone developed across the South China Sea over the course of the early second millennium AD between these two economic regions.

Derek Heng is Professor and Chair of History at Northern Arizona University. He specializes in the pre-modern trans-regional history of Maritime Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, utilising textual and archaeological data to study the interactions between Southeast Asia and China, and their impact on the state formation process in coastal Southeast Asia.

Friday, November 3, 2017, 5pm
2017 Annual Tang Lecture in Silk Road Studies
The Mongols and the Changing Patterns of Indian Ocean Connections
Tansen Sen, Professor, NYU Shanghai
Toll Room, Alumni House

Co-sponsored by the Mongolia Initiative

Annual Tang Lecture in Silk Road Studies image


In the thirteenth century, the expansion of Mongol forces under Genghis Khan and his descendants resulted in the formation of a vast Eurasian empire stretching from the Korean peninsula to central Europe. Despite the eventual fragmentation of this Mongol empire into four contending khanates, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented interactions between polities and societies across the Eurasian realm. Past studies highlighting these exchanges have primarily focused on the overland connections. This paper will demonstrate that the formation of the Mongol empire also had a significant impact on the Indian Ocean world. It will argue that new patterns of maritime exchanges emerged as a consequence of the connections between the Yuan empire in China, South Asia, and the Ilkhanate in Iran. These new patterns are discernible with regard to the use of naval power, diplomacy, commercial linkages, and cultural diffusion. The Ming voyages lead by the eunuch admiral Zheng He in the early fifteenth century and even the initial Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean, the paper will contend, followed some of the key patterns of maritime exchanges that developed during the Mongol period.

Tansen Sen is Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Professor, NYU. He received his MA from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu, 510.642.0333

Friday, October 20, 2017, 2pm
Blown across the Sea: Glass along the Maritime Silk Road
Sanjyot Mehendale, Chair, Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, UC Berkeley
141 McCone Hall Blown across the Sea: Glass along the Maritime Silk Road image

This lecture will highlight the results of underwater surveys of a 2000-year-old shipwreck uncovered off the coast of the small fishing village of Godavaya, Sri Lanka. The ship's cargo of glass ingots, among other objects, will be the starting point of a discussion on the movement of glass raw materials and finished objects along the intertwined maritime and overland trading networks commonly referred to as the Silk Road. In particular, the talk will focus on the implications of this evidence for archaeological analysis of early patterns of globalization.

Sanjyot Mehendale is Chair of the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies, at UC Berkeley. An archaeologist specializing in cross-cultural connections of early Common Era Eurasia, she teaches on Central Asia in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu, 510.642.0333

Thursday, September 21, 2017, 5pm
Maritime Diffusion of Buddhist Philosophical Thought and Art
Osmund Bopearachchi, Adjunct Professor, UC Berkeley
Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
Co-sponsored by the Center for Buddhist Studies

Trade is understood mainly as the transfer and exchange of commodities to make profits, and this was also the driving force of economic activities in ancient time. However, as revealed by epigraphic and literary evidence, among the earliest donors and important patrons of Buddhist establishments in South and South-East Asia were caravan merchants and wealthy seafaring traders. The spread of Buddhism from South Asia to Southeast Asia is also closely connected with the growth of a trading network that facilitated the movement of Buddhist merchants, traveling monks and teachers. The resources needed to build gigantic religious monuments in South and South-East Asia would thus have come from both the royal patronage as well as from the devout mercantile classes. Their wealth was based on the flourishing inland and international trade centers located in the ports along the coast and navigable river.

Osmund Bopearachchi is Adjunct Professor of Central and South Asian Art, Archaeology, and Numismatics, University of California, Berkeley, and Emeritus Director of Research of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.-E.N.S. Paris) . A numismatist, historian, and archaeologist, he has published ten books, edited six books, and written over 150 articles.

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu, 510.642.0333

Tuesday, September 12, 2017, 7pm
Beads, Trade, and the Emergence of Complexity in Ancient Southeast Asia
Alison Carter, University of Oregon
Dwinelle 370
Organized by the Archaeological Institute of America Sponsored by the Tang Center for Silk Road Studies and the Institute of East Asian Studies

Around 500 B.C. people in South Asia (primarily India and Sri Lanka) began interacting with people in Southeast Asia. Some of the earliest indicators of this contact are stone and glass beads that were imported from South Asia and widely traded across Southeast Asia. These beads were important symbols of prestige and power. In this presentation, Dr. Carter discusses her study of beads from 12 archaeological sites in Cambodia and Thailand and illuminates for us what can be learned from those beads about early trade networks, various means of exchange, as well as who may have been facilitating such trading and wearing the beads.

Dr. Alison Carter is an anthropological archaeologist with an interest in the political economy and evolution of complex societies in Southeast Asia. Other research interests include the archaeology of East and South Asia, materials analysis and LA-ICP­-MS, craft technology and specialization, household archaeology, ritual and religion, trade and exchange, and bead studies.

Event Contact: tangsilkroadcenter@berkeley.edu, 510.642.0333