SEAArch - The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

While I’m at the tail end of the World Rock Art course, I’ve also real salad of posts from all Indonesia and Cambodia to feature in this week’s rojak.

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A 600-year-old skeleton, one of the four recovered during the discovery of the old fort walls of Malacca, is the highlight of the Archaeology Discovery Exhibition at the Negri Sembilan Museum. The article states erroneously that four skeletons were found during the excavation - actually, 10 skeletons were found, but only four of the better-preserved and more complete skeletons were recovered.

600-year-old skeleton pulls in the crowd
New Straits Times, 21 November 2008
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The Thai-owned Angkor National Museum is off to a rocky start, as the Phnom Penh Post discovers, in the wake of critical reviews since its opening in June.

Thai-owned museum weathers criticism
Phnom Penh Post, 02 October 2008
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The Radya Pustaka Musem is in the news again, after the discovery that a substantial number of bronze artefacts in the museum’s collection are in fact, fakes. The oldest museum in Indonesia was in the news late last year when a theft ring was busted, involving some of the staff of the museum who made copies of the museum’s artefacts and sold off the originals.

Solo Police Investigates Theft of Museum’s Bronze Statue
Tempo Interactive, 25 September 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

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The National Museum of Cambodia is boosted by a full-time staff of archaeological team, whose work is to restore and conserve the museums’s ceramics collection. This is made possible by funding from the Smithsonian Institute.

Smithsonian funds new lab
Phnom Penh Post, 25 September 2008
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I’m back in Singapore for the weekend and one of the items on my to-do list was to visit the Vietnam: From Myth to Modernity exhibition at the Asian Civilisations Museum. When this exhibition first opened, I had only just started my stint up north, so I was glad to finally have been able to catch this exhibition before it closed at the end of this month. If you’ve been a loyal reader of this blog, you would have realised that by far, Vietnam is the most prolific country in terms of archaeological news that gets published here - this is in part because Vietnam’s archaeological heritage is quite varied and multi-layered. I haven’t visited Vietnam myself, and I reckon it’d take me at least three or four trips to see everything that I want to see. In this respect, this exhibition did quite a good job in revealing the breadth of Vietnam’s history from prehistory to modernity through the country’s artifacts. Read on to discover Vietnam’s archaeological heritage.

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The Jakarta Post had a double feature on the publicly funded Conservation Institute, responsible for the conservation of Jakarta’s museum. Like most conservation agencies, they suffer from a lack of funding and manpower, as well as a lack of confidence from private collectors.

Museum conservation specialists step up
Jakarta Post, 11 September 2008

Local restorers have yet to gain credibility
Jakarta Post, 11 September 2008
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