BROGLASEA

BROGLASEA aims to provide a critical prehistoric case study for the complex cultural transmissions by which a major region can have its endogenous socio-economic and political characteristics transformed by the imitation, adaptation and adoption of exogenous practices. The principal vectors of such external stimuli, migration and trade, and the concomitant questions of cultural and economic convergence versus divergence, remain profoundly relevant to our early 21st century paradigms of globalisation and transnational integration and governance e.g. the WTO, the UN, the EU, and the ASEAN. Southeast Asia’s colonial period name, Indochina, reflects an entrenched tendency to downplay Southeast Asian agency and regard foreign influences as paramount to understanding the region’s history. It would be obtuse to deny the importance of external influence but a dogmatic ‘Indochina’ standpoint overlooks a marked and persistent trait for innovation, in the sense that foreign cultural practices were adopted after having been modified to meet regional needs, and that these adaptations subsequently catalysed the development of Southeast Asian societies (e.g. Bellina, 2014). This cultural flexibility is perhaps to be expected considering Southeast Asia’s geographical situation, which, as the crossroads between East and South Asia and the Pacific, has witnessed millennia of variable-intensity population movements, some of which settled and added their cultural practices to the regional pool. Such a ‘middle-ground’ perspective has been espoused in various forms over three decades but the uniqueness of the BROGLASEA proposal is that reliable and testable material culture data will add much-needed precision to the identification of the specific culture-regions that impacted late prehistoric Southeast Asia. The artefact classes under study, copper-base alloys and glass, are thought to have constituted critical transmission media for foreign (for which read ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’) ideologies and value systems, and as such may have been prestigious materials sought after by Southeast Asia’s putative incipient political élites from the beginning of the Bronze and Iron Ages, respectively. Copper-base alloys and glass also share the analytical advantage of having sufficient archaeological ubiquity to be useful for large spatial studies and their physico-chemical characteristics lend themselves to the reconstruction of production, exchange and consumption networks using high-resolution elemental and isotopic analyses. These networks, which previous methodological iterations indicate to span several thousand kilometres and years (Dussubieux & Gratuze, 2010, Pryce et al., 2014a), represent diachronically-shifting webs of supply and demand pressure for exotic goods and their local imitations in the context and as a consequence of Southeast Asia’s evolving social complexity. BROGLASEA will allow for substantially greater confidence when inferring cultural influence and borrowing between widely separated social groups during the critical processes that shaped late prehistoric Southeast Asia and touched its terrestrial neighbours and far-flung maritime contacts. BROGLASEA’s collaboration between the French UMRs “Prétech”, “TRACES”, “NIMBE” and the Elemental Analysis Facility of the Chicago Field Museum, as well as with western institutions in Australia, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, and their counterparts in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, has been founded to provide expertise in all necessary disciplines and regions. We intend that this research raises the profile of Southeast Asian late prehistory as worthy of global methodological and theoretical comparison but also draws attention to the damage wrought by the region’s rampant looting problem, which particularly targets the copper-base and glass artefacts that could otherwise tell us so much.