For anyone who is interested in early humans and their interactions and wants to look deep into the origins of mankind, this is a must-read! Human movements in East and Southeast Asia have often been overlooked, in spite of the really important discoveries of h. floresiensis, h. luzonensis, and h. longi in the region, and this introduces the current state of the field in easy and approachable language, but also with sufficient detail and discussion of controversial points of interpretation to get a real feel for the key questions that have been answered and the ones that are yet to come. A marvelous book, and one that asks you questions you have probably never considered, like: Did a Neanderthal ever look out at the Pacific Ocean?
In Asia, research in human evolution has long been considered to have lagged far behind what was going on in places like Africa and Europe. Oftentimes this is due to the limited dissemination of research findings rather than the lack of actual research. The Paleoanthropology of Eastern Asia is an attempt to rectify this discrepancy by providing rich evidence rooted in deep research traditions from East and Southeast Asia. It covers fossils from the earliest arrival of hominins more than two million years ago to the end of the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago. During this wide span of…
Thanks to the brutal robbery of ancient tombs across the Philippines during the colonial era, vast quantities of their ancestral goldwork was torn from graves to be melted down and shipped to Spain, as indigenous art traditions and skills were stamped out and the descendants of these highly skilled people forced into poverty. This wonderful book, featuring pieces currently on display at the Ayala Museum in Manila, focuses on some scattered surviving remnants of this once-vibrant artistic tradition, mostly obtained from tombs on the southern island of Mindanao. A fascinating fusion of Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese techniques and artistic styles went into these truly beautiful pieces of goldwork, and this book also features delightful illustrations taken from the Boxer Codex to show how they would have been worn. It's a window into an otherwise lost tradition, and a tribute to the artists who once produced these extraordinary objects.
Philippine Ancestral Gold is a spectacular publication in full-color that features more than 1,000 gold objects that were recovered in the Philippines from the 1960s to 1981 and now form part of the collection of the Ayala Museum in Manila. Many of these treasures were found in association with tenth-to-twelfth century Chinese export ceramics, and formal similarities with objects from other Southeast Asian cultures affirm regional affinities and inter-island trade networks that flourished in the region before there was regular contact with the Western world. Adornments of elite individuals and the deities they adored include a spectacular array of golden…
There are very few good books on the culture of the Iban people of Borneo, and so I was thrilled to get a copy of this 2005 classic! This is a deep dive into the culture of Borneo, and although it covers many aspects of Iban artistic expression, as the title suggests, this focuses particularly on the longstanding relationship between beautiful weavings and head-hunting. A highly skilled woman weaver would produce the finest textiles to demand a head from her spouse to show that he was worthy of staying married to her. This is an extraordinary anthropological study of an alien way of life, and is highly effective in demonstrating the intimate connection between weaving and killing people, with the women's lovely fabrics calling for heads with each seemingly-innocuous design motif.
The author describes the ikat, sungkit, pilih, and other forms of Iban weaving, the sculptures, the tattooing, metal forging, and other art of the Iban in the context of their oral sagas, stories, poetry, and love songs. He shows how art was used as a pre-literate scholastic aptitude test to ensure intelligent Iban married other intelligent Iban to increase the likelihood that their children were intelligent and were more likely to prosper. Women also chose men on the basis of their prowess at war to ensure the household, physically, was secure. That meant heads and headhunting. The book shows how…
Deep inside the Zhou royal palace, an ancient curse is released, and darkness spreads across the land. An incompetent king's mad passion for a teenaged slave leads to the country being torn apart by civil war. As the situation unravels, will anyone attempt to stand against the forces of chaos?
One of the great works of Chinese literature, Kingdoms in Peril is an epic historical novel charting the five hundred years leading to the unification of the country in 221 B.C.E. under the rule of the legendary First Emperor. Writing some fourteen hundred years later, the Ming-era author Feng Menglong drew on a vast trove of literary and historical documents to compose a gripping narrative account of how China was forged.
Detailing the stories of unforgettable characters who defined and shaped the times in which they lived, the complete edition of Kingdoms in Peril is a vital resource for those seeking a comprehensive overview of China's ancient past and the political machinations that led to its unification. There are many historical works that provide an account of some of these events, but none are as thrilling and breathtakingly memorable as Kingdoms in Peril.
