The Asian Civlisations Museum is hosting an online talk by Horst Liebner next Wednesday at 7.00 pm (Singapore time) on its Facebook page.
Dr Horst Liebner will examine archaeological finds, historic sources and current traditions to explore the practicalities behind Asian pre-modern maritime connections. How did people deal with the environmental factors that shaped sea-borne communications? What drove people onto the sea, and how successful were they in pursuing their quests? Who was involved in this traffic, and what can we know about its range and scope? The paper will highlight the inter-dependability of nature, technical competence, organisational capabilities and models of authority, and question actors, purposes and the volume of the region’s historic far-distance voyaging. In doing so it will draw a somewhat different picture to what is commonly envisioned under the tag of the Maritime Silk Road.Speaker
Horst Liebner is an independent scholar associated with Indonesia’s Coordination Ministry for Maritime Affairs studying the maritime traditions and history of Insular Southeast Asia. He received his PhD from University of Leeds, UK (2014) which focused on the examination of the 10th century Nanhan/Cirebon wreck. He is currently is involved in documenting and preserving Sulawesi’s boatbuilding traditions, in 2017 inscribed in UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and maintains the website www.pinisi.org for this purpose. In 2019/20 he organised the building of two replica of 19th-century Makassan trading vessels for exhibitions and expeditions.
