Earlier this year I posted a call by the Archaeology Unit from the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies for The Australian Historic Shipwreck Protection Project. The Age has a story out about the underwater excavation and a mention about the Southeast Asian archaeologists working at the site.

Wreck reveals its bounty
The Age, 17 April 2012

One of Australia’s largest underwater research projects started this week when a team of 60 scientists, students and volunteers began a month-long study of the Clarence’s remains.

With a $500,000 grant from the Australian Research Council, those involved in the three-year project will examine the hull of the 67-tonne, 15-metre wooden ship and the objects found aboard it.

Monash University marine archaeologist Mark Staniforth says the research is intended to develop a “sophisticated protocol” for rapid excavation, detailed recording and reburial of significant shipwrecks that are at risk — “and to foster a strategic national approach for shipwreck management”.

…

The National University of Singapore is another sponsor. It has paid for four Asian marine archaeologists from Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines to take part in the excavation. Professor Staniforth says that although thousands of shipwrecks are scattered around the Asian region, there are few trained specialists to work on them. Taking part in a big underwater excavation is something the visitors have never experienced before.

Full story here.

Archaeologists in Taiwan are hoping to get independent reviews of skeletal remains found in Liang Island, about 200 miles west of Taiwan, which is thought to date to 7,900 years ago.

Skeletal remains from Lian Island, Taiwan Today 20120403

Taiwan find may throw light on Pacific settlers
AFP, 03 April 2012

CCA seeks foreign review of Neolithic skeleton
Taiwan Today, 03 April 2012

Taiwanese archaeologists working on an islet off China have unearthed the remains of a Stone Age male who may provide clues about ancient people who eventually dispersed throughout the entire Pacific.
The man, who was about 35 when he died nearly eight thousand years ago, may be a remote relative of Taiwan’s aborigines who today make up about two percent of the island’s population, according to the head of the team, Chen Chung-yu.
“Judging from the way the body was buried, it could be a person from what we now call the Austronesia language family,” said Chen, a research fellow at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica institute.
Taiwan’s aborigines belong to the same language family, as do the people who migrated across the Pacific as far as Eastern Island off the coast of Chile in prehistoric times.

Full story here.

I’ve been slow in getting this news out which has been floating about a week already. An article in PLoS One discusses a set of human remains from China, dating to about 11,000 years old, containing a mix of modern and archaic hominid traits and may suggest a late-surviving set of archaic hominids, or part of an earlier human migration out of Africa that has been undetected until now.

Human Remains from the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition of Southwest China Suggest a Complex Evolutionary History for East Asians
Darren Curnoe1, Ji Xueping, Andy I. R. Herries, Bai Kanning, Paul S. C. Taçon, Bao Zhende, David Fink, Zhu Yunsheng, John Hellstrom, Luo Yun, Gerasimos Cassis, Su Bing, Stephen Wroe, Hong Shi, William C. H. Parr, Huang Shengmin, Natalie Rogers
PLoS ONE 7(3): e31918. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031918

Human fossils hint at new species
BBC, 14 March 2012

‘Red Deer Cave people’ may be new species of human
The Guardian, 14 March 2012

Mysterious ‘Red-deer Cave people’ fossils found in China
EarthSky, 20 March 2012

Abstract:

Background
Later Pleistocene human evolution in East Asia remains poorly understood owing to a scarcity of well described, reliably classified and accurately dated fossils. Southwest China has been identified from genetic research as a hotspot of human diversity, containing ancient mtDNA and Y-DNA lineages, and has yielded a number of human remains thought to derive from Pleistocene deposits. We have prepared, reconstructed, described and dated a new partial skull from a consolidated sediment block collected in 1979 from the site of Longlin Cave (Guangxi Province). We also undertook new excavations at Maludong (Yunnan Province) to clarify the stratigraphy and dating of a large sample of mostly undescribed human remains from the site.

Methodology/Principal Findings
We undertook a detailed comparison of cranial, including a virtual endocast for the Maludong calotte, mandibular and dental remains from these two localities. Both samples probably derive from the same population, exhibiting an unusual mixture of modern human traits, characters probably plesiomorphic for later Homo, and some unusual features. We dated charcoal with AMS radiocarbon dating and speleothem with the Uranium-series technique and the results show both samples to be from the Pleistocene-Holocene transition: ~14.3-11.5 ka.

Conclusions/Significance
Our analysis suggests two plausible explanations for the morphology sampled at Longlin Cave and Maludong. First, it may represent a late-surviving archaic population, perhaps paralleling the situation seen in North Africa as indicated by remains from Dar-es-Soltane and Temara, and maybe also in southern China at Zhirendong. Alternatively, East Asia may have been colonised during multiple waves during the Pleistocene, with the Longlin-Maludong morphology possibly reflecting deep population substructure in Africa prior to modern humans dispersing into Eurasia.

Archaeologists have long known about the linguistic and genetic links between Madagascar and Indonesia; new research suggests that Madagascar was populated fairly recently from a small pool of approximately 30 Indonesian women. At 1,200 years ago, this would put it right at the time when Srivijaya was the dominant power in the islands. Interesting, but also not surprising!

A small cohort of Island Southeast Asian women founded Madagascar
Murray P. Cox, Michael G. Nelson, Meryanne K. Tumonggor, François-X. Ricaut and Herawati Sudoyo
Published online before print March 21, 2012, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.0012
Proc. R. Soc. B

30 Indonesian Women (Accidentally) Founded Madagascar
Live Science, 20 March 2012

Abstract:
The settlement of Madagascar is one of the most unusual, and least understood, episodes in human prehistory. Madagascar was one of the last landmasses to be reached by people, and despite the island’s location just off the east coast of Africa, evidence from genetics, language and culture all attests that it was settled jointly by Africans, and more surprisingly, Indonesians. Nevertheless, extremely little is known about the settlement process itself. Here, we report broad geographical screening of Malagasy and Indonesian genetic variation, from which we infer a statistically robust coalescent model of the island’s initial settlement. Maximum-likelihood estimates favour a scenario in which Madagascar was settled approximately 1200 years ago by a very small group of women (approx. 30), most of Indonesian descent (approx. 93%). This highly restricted founding population raises the possibility that Madagascar was settled not as a large-scale planned colonization event from Indonesia, but rather through a small, perhaps even unintended, transoceanic crossing.

Excerpt from story:

Previous genetic research showed that, surprisingly, instead of coming from Africa, the people living on the island off the east coast of Africa seem to have come from Indonesia, another island nation a quarter of the world, or some 3,500 miles (about 5,600 kilometers), away.

“What we haven’t known is exactly how that happened. When did those people arrive and how did they arrive?” Cox said.

To find out, Cox and his colleagues analyzed genes from the mitochondria of 300 native Madagascans and 3,000 Indonesians. Mitochondria are the cell’s energy factories, but they are special because their genes are inherited only from our mothers.

These genes showed a clear similarity between the Indonesian and Madagascar genomes. To find out how long ago and how many Indonesian settlers there when the island’s population was founded, the team ran various computer simulations that started out with different founding populations at different times until the results matched their real-life data. The researchers found that the island was most likely settled by a small population of about 30 women, who arrived in Madagascar around 1,200 years ago. Ninety-three percent (28) of these women were Indonesian, and the other 7 percent (two individuals) were African.

Full story here.

Judging from the number of mentions in the media, this has been the biggest trending story for Southeast Asian Arrchaeology this week. India announced that they would be building a replica of Angkor Wat at Bihar, which would be the taller than the original in Cambodia and the tallest Hindu temple in the world after it is completed in 10 years time. The new temple will be called Virat Angkor Wat Ram temple. I’m not sure what the Cambodian reaction is to this, but reading some Cambodian forums I get the sense some of discomfort from replicating Angkor Wat because it is a national icon. What do you think? Is building a replica of Angkor Wat a good idea? Would it be a good tourist draw? Would it draw tourists away from the original Angkor Wat? (which may not be such a bad thing…)

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat temple replica’s foundation-laying begins in India
Global Post, 05 March 2012

Angkor Wat temple ‘Bhumi-pujan’ today
The Times of India, 05 March 2012

India Plans Angkor Wat Replica
Huffington Post, 05 March 2012

By Ganga in Bihar, a new Angkor Wat rises
AFP, via The Asian Age, 06 March 2012

India building replica of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat
AP, via The Star, 06 March 2012

India constructing larger replica of Angkor Wat
CNNgo, 06 March 2012

Angkor Wat in India? 20M Replica to Rise in Bihar
International Business Times, 06 March 2012

From the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, an opportunity for Southeast Asian Archaeologists to train in an underwater archaeology fieldwork project in Australia:

The Australian Historic Shipwreck Protection Project
Location: Port Philip Bay, Victoria, Australia
Dates: 16 April – 11 May 2012
Deadline for submission: 24 February 2012
Registration details here.

Applicants are being sought from Southeast Asian archaeologists interested in pursuing a four-week underwater archaeology fieldwork program at the Clarence (1850) shipwreck in Port Phillip Bay, near the city of Melbourne, in Australia. The Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre (NSC) Archaeology Unit (AU) will be giving financial travel assistance to 2-3 successful applicants to gain experience in conducting underwater archaeology, with a maximum of SGD$2,000 per applicant. The AHSP project team will be providing for the accommodation and food costs for the period in which the applicant will be with the project (see the next section for further information). Preference will be given to students at the postgraduate level, or younger professionals in archaeological institutions.

Applicants for this travel assistance should ideally be archaeologists who are citizens of Southeast Asian countries. Southeast Asian nations include: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, The Philippines, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam. Preference will be given to SCUBA divers (though this is not an absolute requirement) and/or those recently trained in underwater archaeology. A good command of English is essential.

The deadline for applications in on 24 Feb 2011. For full application requirements and form, please see the NSC website here.

Readers in Singapore may be interested in this talk about ceramics production in Mainland SEA by Louise Cort and Leedom Lefferts. Click on the image to download the flyer (pdf). No registration is required.

Pots and how they are made in mainland Southeast Asia
Louise Allison Cort and Leedom Lefferts
Friday, 17 February 2012, 7 to 8.30pm
Ngee Ann Auditorium, Asian Civilisations Museum

In what is seen as an attempt to extend the country’s reach, China has offered help with detecting shipwrecks along Sri Lanka’s coastline. Sri Lanka would have been an important stop along the maritime silk route in ancient times.

China offers S.Lanka help to find Silk Route wrecks
AFP, via MSN News, 18 January 2012

Chinese authorities are seeking permission to explore Sri Lanka’s coastline for possible Chinese ship wrecks from the ancient Silk Route era, an official said Wednesday.

… The unsolicited offer by Science Foundation of China to deploy experts to look for vessels along Sri Lanka’s coast was under consideration, Director General of Archaeology Senarath Disanayake told AFP.

He said, however, that the Chinese had asked to keep half of all antiquities brought up from the ocean bed — a condition Sri Lanka could not agree to.

Full story here.