![[Talk] The Ancient Town of Si Thep in Thailand: A Crossroads of Indianization](https://www.southeastasianarchaeology.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/the-ancient-town-of-si-thep-in-thailand-a-crossroads-of-indianization-502-120x86.jpg)
Readers may be interested in this online symposium happening on Monday (28 February). Registration in the link below.
Epigraphic sources offer unique and otherwise unattainable insights that inform our understanding of the Indian Ocean past. At the same time, comparing different regions, traditions, and languages, as an Indian Ocean framework encourages its scholars to do, affords broader understandings of this region’s interconnected land- and seascapes. The characteristics of port cities, trade and religious dynamics, the competitors for political power, the role and origins of merchant communities, and the presence of overseas residents can all be approached through epigraphic sources. A comparison between regions historically in contact – such as Java and Bengal, or Sumatra and the Coromandel Coast – adds exiting details to these often partly forgotten histories.
As a follow-up on our previous symposium on epigraphy and Indian Ocean Studies in December 2021, which focused on the contacts in the first millennium CE, we now call attention to the continuities and ruptures in the following centuries. The Leiden Centre for Indian Ocean Studies again invites scholars whose work has illuminated the connections between multiple Indian Ocean regions by incorporating epigraphic material into multidisciplinary approaches. What can we learn from approaching these sources from an Indian Ocean vantage point? How did different groups, religions, and cultures interact with each other? How are these connections incorporated into – or ignored by – colonial and national historiographies?
