Victor Goloubew and the Disappearance of the Indonesien Creators of the Bronze Drums

In 1929, Victor Goloubew, a Russian-born scholar who worked for the French École française d’Extrême-Orient, publshed an article in which he examined some of the materials that had been found by Louis Pajot in his excavations at Đông Sơn.

At that time, it was still not clear to scholars who had originally made the bronze drums. Hirth had argued that they had been created by the Chinese during their expeditions against savages (man 蠻) in the south in the first century CE, whereas De Groot had contended that the bronze drums were created by those very people whom the Chinese had campaigned against.

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Flying Heads, Third Gender Spirit Mediums and Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study

Someone asked me today to suggest some books about the general history of Southeast Asia, and this reminded me of a larger “problem” that I’ve been thinking about for a…

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