SEACOR and SEACHART
Research Projects on Southeast Asian Archaeology
SEACOR stands for South East Asian Corpus. SEACHART stands for South East Asian Corpus of Historical Architecture and Related Texts. These two research projects are intended to dovetail, SEACOR coming first and leading on to SEACHART. Both projects stem from discussions held in the course of 1997 between Professor Karel R. van Kooij (Leiden) and Professor Thomas S. Maxwell (Bonn) and their colleagues within the framework of a Bonn-Leiden co-operation which they established jointly. Their chief long-term purpose is to concentrate all available primary source material (mainly architecture, iconographic imagery, inscriptions, and texts) concerning the historical past of South East Asia up to the 15th century CE in one programme which relates them to each other in an accessible, manoeuverable, and modifiable form.By T.S. Maxwell
This electronic product (CD ROMs and picture-CDs) will be available for use as a fundamental educational resource in schools and universities in South East Asia and Europe, and as a research instrument for scholars and practising architects. In the terms of this project South East Asia comprises Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. The project will regard this geographical region as a whole cultural entity, and it will concern itself essentially with the assembly, re-evaluation, and interrelating of concrete source materials, rather than with the repetition of existing theory, reference to which will be restricted to bibliographical indicators.Theoretical structures generated within the project will derive from the analysis of the archaeological sources themselves. Since the concern of the project is for future education policy and practice, it will be an international, interuniversity, and interdisciplinary project at every stage, run in consultation with the education ministries concerned as well as research scholars in South East Asia and Europe through evaluation conferences.
Historical shrines
The research process begins with SEACOR-1: South East Asian Historical Shrines, which starts in early 1998 at the School of Architecture, National University of Singapore, and at the Seminar für Orientalische Kunstgeschichte (SOK: Department of Oriental Art History), University of Bonn, and will run for two years. Twenty-three temples and shrines located in six South East Asian countries and related inscriptions of the 8th to 10th centuries have been selected for architectural analysis in the first instance, using visual documentation in a multimedia database including colour images and videos, plans, 3-D modelling and text, with concurrent reworking of the original inscriptions in Sanskrit, Khmer, and Old Javanese, text-analysis using sets of informational categories, and new translations into (in the first instance) English and German. The aim at this SEACOR-1 stage is to create a corpus of material in electronic form, database / browse file, and a series of hard-copy articles / reports.
Professor Kamaleshwar Bhattacharya (CNRS), specialist in South East Asian epigraphy and religions, has expressed agreement with the objectives of the project and we hope he will take an active part in it.
Funding for SEACOR-1 was approved in early December 1997 by the national University of Singapore; the proposal for the German side of the project has been submitted to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG: German Research Council); interim support is being provided by the Alice Boner Foundation, Zürich. The people involved are Associate Professor Milton Tan, Director of CASA (Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture) and the new Head of Singapore's School of Architecture; Professor Thomas S. Maxwell, Director of SOK in Bonn, initiator of the project and Principal Investigator at the German end; Dr Pinna Indorf, Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and the project's joint initiator and Principal Investigator at the Singapore end; Dr Karl-Heinz Golzio, Sanskritist, currently lecturing on Khmer Sanskrit inscriptions at Würzburg University; Mr. T.K. Sabathy, Senior Lecturer at the Singapore School of Architecture; and Mr. Loo Kok Hoo, architect and tutor at the School. The CD ROMs and other digital products containing the visual and textual material will be produced in Singapore, which is also the jumping-off point for specific field-research objectives; text production and work on the inscriptions will be undertaken in Bonn. Research assistants and Student assistants will join at both the Bonn and Singapore ends (see Note below).
Multimedia database
The SEACOR-1 results will be incorporated into OASIS, a proposed multimedia database project in CASA at the School of Architecture, National University of Singapore, and into SEACHART, the proposed successor research project of the Bonn-Leiden co-operation. Selection and processing of the visual material for SEACOR-1 has been initiated in Singapore in conjunction with the Bonn-Leiden co-operation by Professor Maxwell and Dr Indorf, whose SEATAG project on architectural terminology (South-East Asian Traditional Architecture Glossary) will be completed in February 1998; within the existing Bonn-Leiden framework, the database for SEACHART is being prepared by Associate Professor Hedi I. R. Hinzler (Leiden) and Professor Maxwell. The intellectual focus in SEACOR-1 is architecture, the temple or shrine as a three-dimensional structure and Bedeutungsträger insofar as form, iconography and inscriptions permit interpretation of intended meaning and purpose; in SEACHART the focus will switch to cult, the nature and function of the prevailing deities at particular historical moments, within the context of surviving material and literary culture. The experience gained from SEACOR will largely determine the working methodologies for SEACHART.
Both SEACOR and SEACHART proceed on the assumption that the primary source materials for the history of South East Asia have yet to be collated, revised, and presented in usable form as a unified corpus relating to the region as a whole. A further assumption is that the information contained in these materials has not yet been fully extracted or interrelated, partly because the four basic sources (architectural form, iconographic imagery, epigraphy, texts) themselves have until now been largely treated in watertight compartments and imperfectly understood.
Participants in a series of conferences sponsored by SEAMEO's SPAFA (South East Asian Ministers of Education Organization Project for Archaeology and Fine Arts), one of which was held in Singapore in 1994, focused on precisely this problem, the reasons for it, and on possible solutions. After several years, however, no unified plan or specific project has yet emerged. Parallel to these South East Asia based conferences, South Asianists and South East Asianists in Bonn and Leiden considered the question in a series of conferences organised by Professor Maxwell and Professor Van Kooij. SEACOR and SEACHART are the direct results of these discussions, aimed at providing a clear and rationalized basis for a solution to the problem.
By approaching the situation by the methods outlined here, the projects initiated by the co-operation between Leiden, Bonn, and Singapore propose to provide an accessible, accurate, and impartial basis, in electronic and hard-copy form, for the teaching of South-East Asian History and civilization in Europe, a database for working architects in South-East Asia concerned with questions of identity within their own heritage, and a readily updatable resource for researchers in the 21st century.
:T. S. Maxwell is Professor of Oriental Art History and Department Director at the University of Bonn.