SEAArch – The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

The BBC World Service has a podcast on China’s Forgotten Admiral – Admiral Zheng He, who in the 1400s travelled from China to Africa, making stops through Southeast Asia.

China’s Forgotten Admiral
BBC World Service, 05 February 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

The director-general of the Thai Fine Arts Department reports on the progress of a project to digitally recreate the buildings of Ayutthaya.

Ayutthaya Historical Park taking shape
The Nation, 05 February 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

An archaeological team from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and Terengganu Museum report the discovery of human skeletal remains, estimated to be about 8,000 years-old, from a site at Kenyir cave at the state of Terengganu in the Malaysian Peninsula.

Mesolithic Age Skeletal Remains Found In Terengganu Cave
Bernama, 06 February 2010

8,000-year-old human remains found
The Star, 07 February 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

The Asia Society in New York opens the exhibition Arts of Ancient Vietnam: From River Plain to Open Sea last week. Readers who might not be able to make it to New York for the exhibition may be interested in the book available here.

Ancient Vietnam exhibition opens in the US
VOV News, 02 February 2010

Ancient Vietnam exhibition opens in New York
Vietnam Net Bridge, 02 February 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

A new paper published in BMC Biology may possibly reconcile the small size of the Hobbit’s brain with tool use – one of the arguments against the hobbit being a new species as it is assumed that for something as sophisticated as tool use – you’d need a pretty big brain. The study by Montgomery et al looked at the brain and body size of over 50 primate species indicate that while both brain and body size tend to grow with time, there is sufficient evidence to show that the opposite is also true, ie, shrinkage also does occur in some cases. So it looks like that it is possible for the Hobbit to have evolved to be smaller, thus strengthening the hypothesis that it’s a new species rather than a deformed human.

photo credit: Ryan Somma

Reconstructing the ups and downs of primate brain evolution: implications for adaptive hypotheses and Homo floresiensis
BMC Biology 2010, 8:9doi:10.1186/1741-7007-8-9

Is the Hobbit’s Brain Unfeasibly Small?
Science Daily, 27 January 2010

Reduced Brain Size of Homo floresiensis Hints at Her Likely Ancestors
Anthropology.net, 28 January 2010
Read the rest of this entry »

The Earth Times reports that the Middle Mekong Archaeological Project has discovered the first instance of a secondary burial in Laos. Read detail accounts of the recent fieldwork in Laos on the MMAP blog.

Secondary Burial from Tham An Mah. Image from the MMAP blog.

Iron Age discovery uncovers prehistoric burial customs in Laos
The Earth Times, 22 January 2009
Read the rest of this entry »

More funding is being allocated to set up tourist villages in a bid to increase tourism at Borobudur.

photo credit: hildo trazo

Borobudur to Woo Visitors With New Tourist Villages
Jakarta Globe, 20 January 2010
Read the rest of this entry »