Cristalliser l’histoire

La Thaïlande péninsulaire compte peu de vestiges archéologiques à l’exception de perles qui cristallisent des passions dévorantes. Collectées, portées, commercialisées, elles font régulièrement la une des journaux. À partir d’une enquête ethnographique réalisée auprès de la mission archéologique franco-thaïe en péninsule thaïe-malaise, cet article éclaire les pratiques de collecte de ces perles par divers acteurs locaux, et envisage les discours et représentations parfois contradictoires auxquels elles donnent lieu.Peninsular Thailand has few archaeological remains except beads that crystallize consuming passions. Collected, worn, traded, they regularly make the headlines of the local and national newspapers. Based on an ethnography conducted within the Franco-Thai archaeo-logical mission, this article investigates how the beads are collected by various kinds of local actors. It also highlights the sometimes conflicting discourses and representations they sustain

Maritime Silk Roads' Ornament Industries: Socio-Political Practices and Cultural Transfers in the South China Sea

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Khao Sam Kaeo. An Early Port-City between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea

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Khao Sam Kaeo: a late prehistoric early port-city between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea

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Cultural Exchange between India and Southeast Asia. Production and distribution of hard stone ornaments (VI c. BC– VI c. AD)

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Southeast Asian Evidence for Early Maritime Silk Road Exchange and Trade-Related Polities

International audienceThis chapter focuses on the recent shift in historical perspectives concerning the mid-first millennium exchanges between the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal and the subsequent new perspectives on the cultural evolution of this broad region. In particular, it reviews the results of recent research conducted on what appeared as the earliest complex trading-polities that developed in the Kra Isthmus from the late 5th-early 4th c BC. The discovery of their cosmopolitan and early urban nature, pushed back in time developments traditionally attributed to the early historical period. These trading polities produced or concentrated many of the shared cultural items distributed over a wide region. Their technological analysis demonstrated that most of these items were culturally hybrid, combining technologies and styles from various Asian horizons thus allowing to discuss further the concept of a pan-regional culture and cultural transfers. These research suggest that instead of envisioning cultural exchanges in terms of internal or external “influences”, those might be better understood as the product of joint-productions co-elaborated in a wider regionally connected area that constituted the Bay of Bengal and South China Sea interaction spheres

La préhistoire des routes maritimes de la soie en Asie du Sud-Est

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LES ROUTES MARITIMES DE LA SOIE EN PENINSULE THAÏ-MALAISE : VERS UNE HISTOIRE SYSTEMIQUE ET MULTIVOCALE

The research presented here concerns the long-lasting economic and cultural research exchange process between the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, focusing on its inception during the late prehistoric period. However, through time, this research has become increasingly involved with contemporaneous populations relating to remains associated to this process being part of what is also called “Maritime Silk Roads”. Taking Braudel has a frame of reference and inspired by research conducted in “global” and “connected history”, the research focuses on the technological systems reconstructions as developed by the laboratory “Préhistoire et Technologie”. They were conducted over more than twenty years alone and from 2005 with the French Archaeological Mission in peninsular Thailand and Myanmar I created. The project aimed at defining the region’s role in developing models and diffusing them in the two maritime basins. The Mission developed a regional archaeology excavating various types of sites belonging to different environments in order to study the co-evolution of the different groups in the peninsula (local and exogenous) in relation to the region’s insertion into the inter-regional exchange networks. The objective was, alternatively, to determine how each group contributed to the historical trajectory. The mission has been able to uncover the earliest city-states of Maritime Southeast Asia excavating and survey in 36 sites. It allowed me to elaborate a model to explain their emergence and socio-political structure. It also revealed the so-called marginal groups’ crucial role in this process, such as in the case of the earliest sea nomads, who might have emerged as an economic specialization in parallel with that of the city-states. The study also showed how these city-states were cradles for a hybrid culture that diffused on a pan-regional scale. By doing so, this research also envisions cultural process through different lenses, those of "co-constructions" within networks of confederated cities for a time allied in a larger connected regional space embracing the two sea basins. Within this vast maritime space are articulated networks of city-states distributed on the Indian coasts, the Thai-Malay peninsula and Southeast Asia. It is a vision fragmented into particularly evanescent networks as they reconfigure themselves through ephemeral alliances. Therefore, it may not be pertinent to think of exchanges in terms of influences from clearly defined and stable poles that would be materialized by arrows on a map. Instead, it would seem more appropriate to design them as dynamic networks with fast configurations in which an active chain of intermediaries with fluctuating allegiances is involved. However, disconcerting it may be for the archaeologist or historian who wishes to trace roads, establish linear and sustainable trajectories, this model proposes a more balanced representation of trade between Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. This research has also been engaged with contemporaneous groups of the isthmus of Kra who felt forgotten by the central plain-driven official history. These needs emerged through their desire to develop heritage centers where local remains could be kept and their narrative could be integrated into the official one.In total, it draws up a plural and systemic history in which the historian integrates different registers, where local and global, central, and marginal, prehistory and the contemporary world are articulated. It is an experience of challenging some of our academic conventions and ways of working. The challenge then consists in writing a plural history of the region's long history, which a new model of heritage institution will have to try to recreate.The research proposal I wish to conduct still combines archaeology, history, ethnography, and museology. It will proceed in the attempt to generate a systemic history (the different groups involved and their environment), multi-scalar (local to interregional scales), plural (involving groups from the cosmopolitan centre and its margins) and multivocal (taking into account the different current actors) of the Maritime Silk Road in the Peninsula. The evolutions of societies and the environment in relation to trade will be considered over a very long period from the Neolithic to the present periods, including the colonial period. This project also aims to promote research and training in France and South-East Asia

The Inception of the Trans-National Processes between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea from an Early City-State on the Thai-Malay Peninsula (Fourth-Second Century Bce)

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