Introduction

Summary

Southeast Asia is today among the most exciting areas for research in historical archaeology.

Henry T. Wright (1998: 343)

The present book is the final product of a conference convened in Singapore in November 2007. The title given to this conference was ‘Early Indian Influences in Southeast Asia’, a concept with a ‘well-established pedigree’, which ‘has rightly left an indelible mark on the field of Southeast Asian studies’ (in the words of Daud Ali in his essay for the present volume). Organisers first sent invitations to a broad community, encouraging papers on the Chola expeditions to Southeast Asia. The many positive answers – too numerous for financial and practical reasons – were filtered down to accommodate some fifty participants, and their presentations were then divided into panels and plenary sessions. Presentations that were related to the Chola expeditions and their context were gathered into one panel, and subsequently published in a separate volume (Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions to Southeast Asia, edited by H. Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja). The other, much larger group of papers was reorganised for publication in the present book, which is the result of a further selection, needed to reduce its size as well as to give it more coherence. As a broad rule, the editors retained only those papers which presented recent data and innovative or renewed approaches. Archaeology lato sensu ended up occupying a large proportion of the book. For reasons explained below, the discipline has thrived in the past years, and its place in this volume is a reflection of its present-day situation in Southeast Asian studies. Chapters presenting and discussing relevant empirical data, mainly derived from recent excavation programmes in both South and Southeast Asia were regrouped in Part I of the book. Some papers on art and architecture, because they presented, rather than empirical data, more of an investigation into the processes at work for the transmission of Indian culture to Southeast Asia, were regrouped with textual studies and history of religions into Part II of this book.