SEAArch - The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

A conference on Archaeological Tourism to be held in next April in Peru, home of the Machu Picchu, a World Heritage Site in danger of being loved to death (which also calls to mind Angkor). Read about the conference details below, and download the registration form here (Deadline 12 Jan 2009).

IV International Conference in Archaeological Tourism

Professionals and researchers of archaeological tourism are invited to participate in the IV International Conference in Archaeological Tourism. This event will take place in Trujillo (Peru), on April 3-5, 2009, organized by IBERTUR Network and PromPeru – Peru Export and Tourism Promotion Board.
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10th Cambridge Heritage Seminar
The Future of Historic Cities: Challenges, Contradictions, Continuities
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK
18-19 April 2009

Deadline for paper proposals: 15 November 2008 (Please see submission details here)

For the past ten years the Cambridge Heritage Seminars have brought together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to explore the most pressing issues in heritage studies today.

For its tenth anniversary in 2009, coinciding with the celebration of the 800th anniversary of the founding of the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge Heritage Seminar will focus on cultural heritage, architecture, and the built environment in the context of a rapidly globalising and modernising world. Taking historic cities as its departure point, the seminar asks: how can urban cultural landscapes be preserved and sustained, challenged as they are by development, legislation, and commodification-and what are the reasons for and outcomes of such preservation?

As scholars such as Patrick Wright, David Lowenthal, and Laurajane Smith argue, the emergence of a heritage consciousness in modernity has depended on a complex, changing relationship not just to what the built heritage is, but how it is valued: what a community reads into the heritage and what they hope to gain from it. Aided by legal protocols that standardise heritage into readymade frameworks of historical, political and economic value, such processes take place on numerous interacting levels - the local, the national, and the international - which rarely operate in harmony. Within an urban setting, where the built environment (and its ruins) produces and is produced by a changing relationship to the past, these issues are highlighted in an immediate and unavoidable way. With this awareness, the Seminar hopes to explore the challenges, contradictions, and complexities that arise in the contemporary analysis of the historic city.
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Hukay: The Journal for Archaeological Research in Asia and the Pacific, published twice a year, is the refereed journal published by the University of the Philippines- Archaeological Studies Program. Hukay accepts articles on the archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and heritage of the Asia and Pacific regions. Reviews of books and articles on similar and related topics are likewise accepted. On occasions, we invite a guest editor to come up with a theme volume. Papers may be submitted throughout the year while contributions for theme volumes have specific deadlines. Articles are reviewed by at least three specialists from a pool of international scholars. Reviewers’ comments and suggestions are forwarded to the author(s), who should implement them in the final version of the paper.

Manuscripts may be mailed or personally submitted with a soft copy to: The Editor, Hukay, Archaeological Studies Program, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines, 1101 or sent to mdbarretto@up.edu.ph

For more information, visit the official HUKAY webpage at http://www.upd.edu.ph/~asp/hukay/

Indonesia Council Open Conference 2009
University of Sydney
Camperdown Campus
15 - 17 July 2009
Please refer to the Indonesia Council website for registration details.

The Indonesia Council will be holding its fifth Open Conference on 15-17 July 2009, immediately after the ASILE conference, also to be held at the University of Sydney.

The ICOC is a multi-disciplinary conference which provides a forum for the presentation of new and innovative work on Indonesia with particular emphasis on encouraging engagement between newer Indonesianists and established scholars. It attracts participants from all over Australia and many other parts of the world.

There is no registration fee for the conference.
The Indonesia Council Open Conference has no funding available to assist participants. Please consult with your university to find out what funding options are available. Once you have registered for the conference we can provide you with a letter of confirmation that may assist you in securing funding.

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Waters in South and Southeast Asia: Interaction of Culture and Religion
3rd SSEASR Conference, Bali Island, Indonesia June 3-6, 2009
For updated information, visit SSEASR
A Regional Conference of the IAHR, member CIPSH under the auspices of the UNESCO organised by
South and Southeast Asian Association for the Study of Culture and Religion in collaboration with
Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) Universitas Hindu Indonesia (UNHI), Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia

Religion is a term which encompasses almost every part of our life. Whether it is our culture, language and literature, history or civilization, social behaviour or understanding of the humanity, religion shapes us. The common inherent traits shared by our various civilisations in the past three millennia make the region of south and Southeast Asia a role model of co-existence where the external elements get accepted adjusted, absorbed and honoured.
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Heritage in Asia: Converging Forces and Conflicting Values
An International Conference, 08-10th January 2009
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Abstract Deadline: 01 September 2008
Further Details and Submission Form Available the Asia Research Institute website.

Rapid economic and social change across Asia today means the region’s heritage is at once under threat and undergoing a revival as never before. Expanding infrastructures, increasing incomes, liberalizing economies and the lowering of borders, both physical and political, are all converging as powerful forces transforming Asia’s social, cultural and physical landscapes. But as the region’s societies look forward, there are competing forces that ensure they re-visit the past and the inherited. In recent years the idea of ‘heritage’ – both natural and cultural – has come to the fore across Asia, driven by a language of identity, tradition, revival, and sustainability. For some, heritage has become an effective means for protecting those landscapes, rituals, artifacts or traditional values endangered by rapid socio-economic change. For others, it has emerged as a valuable resource for achieving wider goals such as poverty alleviation, the legitimization of narratives of place and past, nation building or the cultural profiling of citizens. And yet for others, heritage protection is an obstacle inhibiting progress, national unification, or the shedding of unwanted memories.

In a region of immensely uneven change - such that the pre-/industrial and post-industrial all co-exist to create simultaneous presents – major analytical challenges arise from the need to preserve, safeguard and restore in contexts where aspirations for modernization and development are powerful and legitimate forces. To date however, much of the analysis of heritage in Asia has relied upon inherited or borrowed conceptions, and assumptions about what should be valued and privileged. The legacies of colonialism, state-centric agendas, social inequality, and the uneasy management of pluralist populations all conspire to stifle open and innovative discussion. There is little doubt that over the coming decade the contestations surrounding heritage in Asia will continue to intensify, whereby converging forces and conflicting values are the norm.
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‘Continuity and Change: (Re)conceptualising Power in Southeast Asia’

March 26th-28th 2009
Hosted by CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities),
University of Cambridge, UK

Keynote Speakers:
James Scott (Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology, Yale University)
Shelly Errington (Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)

The study of power in contemporary Southeast Asia has never been more timely. Over the last half-century, the region has undergone innumerable far-reaching changes. It has witnessed the rise of postcolonial nation-states, rapid industrialization, economic growth and democratization but also genocide, political upheaval and widespread repression. Power lies at the core of these important developments, whether in the form of brute military force or as a more capillary ‘disciplinary’ influence on religious and political subjectivities. New religious, economic and political movements—all drawing deeply on local traditions while proposing new forms of personhood, civil and political society—cut across national, cultural, ideological and sectarian boundaries.
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