Ships, Shipwrecks, and Archaeological Recoveries as Sources of Southeast Asian History Ships, Shipwrecks, and Archaeological Recoveries as Sources of Southeast Asian History (original) (raw)

Ships, Shipwrecks, and Archaeological Recoveries as Sources of Southeast Asian History

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2018

Ships form a critical component of the study of Southeast Asia’s interaction both within itself as well as with the major centers of Asia and the West. Shipwreck data, accrued from archaeologically excavated shipwreck sites, provide information on the evolving maritime traditions that traversed Southeast Asian waters over the last two millennia, including shipbuilding and navigational technologies and knowledge, usage of construction materials and techniques, types of commodities carried by the shipping networks, shipping passages developed through Southeast Asia, and the key ports of call that vessels would arrive at as part of the network of economic and social exchanges that came to characterize maritime interactions.

Maritime Trade in Southeast Asia during the Early Colonial Period

PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2014 ASIA-PACIFIC REGIONAL CONFERENCE ON UNDERWATER CULTURAL HERITAGE, 2014

The arrival of naval expeditions in the Philippines and Melaka from Spain and Portugal respectively during the early sixteenth century CE created profound transformations in patterns of Southeast Asian maritime trade as European markets became available to Southeast Asian products and vice versa. The production and distribution of Southeast Asian natural and manufactured products intensified in response to increased supply and demand. This subsequently led to the discovery of raw material sources and production centres as well as the emergence and development of maritime polities that serve as ports of call by various types of watercraft vessels. This paper will present the archaeological excavation results of sixteenth century shipwrecks in Malaysia (Xuande and Wanli), the Philippines (San Isidro and Royal Captain junk) and Thailand (KoSamui and KoKradat) in an attempt to analyse maritime trade patterns as the Southeast Asian region transitioned from its previous intraregional-focus on maritime trade to participants of the global trade economy.

Ships and Shipping in Southeast Asia

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2017

Southeast Asian polities were destined to play an active role in the world economy because of their location at the crossroads of East Asian maritime routes and their richness in commodities that were in demand in the whole of Eurasia. For a long time, historians restricted their role to examination of regional peddling trade carried out in small ships. Research on ships and trade networks in the past few decades, however, has returned considerable agency to local societies, particularly to Austronesian speakers of insular Southeast Asia, from proto-historic to early modern times. As far in the past as two thousand years ago, following locally developed shipbuilding technologies and navigational practices, they built large and sophisticated ships that plied South China Sea and Indian Ocean routes, as documented by 1st-millennium Chinese and later Portuguese sources and now confirmed by nautical archaeology. Textual sources also confirm that local shipmasters played a prominent part ...

A Seat at the Table: Addressing Artefact biases in Asian Shipwreck Assemblages

The ceramic trade throughout Medieval Southeast Asia was prolific. Terrestrial sites have yielded massive amounts of ceramic material and the archaeological reports of shipwreck cargoes corroborate the versatile and extensive qualities of trade ceramics in the region. The sheer quantity of ceramic artefacts found in shipwreck assemblages, paired with a well-researched framework of the aesthetic, show that there is no doubt that we rely heavily on ceramic data to date wrecks and establish regional trading patterns. This paper will debate that we are too 'ceramo-centric' in our analyses of shipwrecks. While ceramics typically represent the bulk of the recovered material in these instances, many other types of media are present in the assemblage. Yet, these “lesser” materials suffer from a lack of investigation and therefore play virtually no role in the archaeological and historical assessment. This case study focuses on the nonceramic assemblages for six shipwrecks from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of Southeast Asia (three Chinese-built and three Southeast Asian-styled junks). The typological study of the metallurgical, organic and geological material from these wrecks can complement much of the work surrounding existing trade models as well as reveal new concepts of crew life, belief systems and culture. These facets come together to offer a more holistic narrative as well as stimulating the need within the region for more study regarding the locations where past peoples mined and manufactured raw metals.