Kamer Aga-Oglu was curator of the Museum’s Asian collections from 1945 to 1974. An extraordinary scholar, Aga-Oglu singlehandedly transformed the study of Asian ceramics, focusing particularly on understudied Asian trade wares in the Museum’s collections. A specialist in Far Eastern art history, she devoted her life’s work to researching the division’s outstanding collection of Asian ceramics. Throughout her entire tenure at the Museum, Kamer Aga-Oglu was the Museum’s only woman curator. Her catalogs of the Williams Collection contain dozens of photographs and detailed descriptions of the pieces.

Economic behavior is governed by two major sets of boundary conditions: environmental and technological factors on the one hand, and conditions of social organization on the other hand. Indeed, social scientists are often particularly interested in the framework of exchange relationships: exchange of goods, services, personnel, and information. Economic exchanges lend concrete manifestations to social relations that themselves may transcend the economic realm and that otherwise are often difficult to trace. Yet in social science research in Southeast Asia, the area of economic studies has lagged behind, despite the great study potential represented by the tremendous diversity of its physical and human environment. Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia attempts to take advantage of that opportunity. As a number of the contributions to this volume show, many if not most of the systems organized on very different levels of integration interact with each other. Taken as a whole, they provide evidence of the incredible diversity of economic and social systems that may be investigated in Southeast Asia.

This work provides access to information on the rich and often little known legacy of anthropological scholarship preserved in a diversity of archives, libraries and museums. Selected anthropological manuscripts, papers, fieldnotes, site reports, photographs and sound recordings in more than 150 repositories are described. Coverage of resources in North American repositories is extensive while Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia and certain other countries are more selectively represented. Entries are arranged by repository location and most contributors draw upon a special knowledge of the resources described. Contributors include James R. Glenn (National Anthropological Archives), Elizabeth Edwards and Veronica Lawrence (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford), Francisco Demetrio, S.J. (Museum and Archives, Xavier University, Philippines) and many others. The guide covers selected documentation in social and cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology and folklore. Some major area studies collections (such as the Asia Collections, Cornell University Libraries, and the Melanesian Archive at the University of California, San Diego) are also represented. Web URLs have been cited when available and personal, and ethnic name indexes are provided.

Each number is the catalogue of a specific school or college of the University.

Beneath the modern skyscrapers of Singapore lie the remains of a much older trading port, prosperous and cosmopolitan and a key node in the maritime Silk Road. This book synthesizes 25 years of archaeological research to reconstruct the 14th-century port of Singapore in greater detail than is possible for any other early Southeast Asian city. The picture that emerges is of a port where people processed raw materials, used money, and had specialized occupations. Within its defensive wall, the city was well organized and prosperous, with a cosmopolitan population that included residents from China, other parts of Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Fully illustrated, with more than 300 maps and colour photos, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea presents Singapore's history in the context of Asia's long-distance maritime trade in the years between 1300 and 1800: it amounts to a dramatic new understanding of Singapore's pre-colonial past.

According to archeological and historical records, the Bahrain Islands of the Arabian Gulf were the home of a flourishing civilization four thousant years ago. Then, as now, these islands served as an important locus of maritime trade, but they were also characterized as a land of copious artesian springs and fertile fields. Modern Bahrain, in contrast, is beset by environmental and demographic problems: the depletion of the artesian water supply, abandonment of rural agricultural lands, and rapid population growth. In this exemplary interdisciplinary study, Curtis E. Larsen combines archeological, geological, historical, and anthropological methods to reconstruct the paleoenvironmental and socioeconomic context that links Bahrain's present to its past.

Glazed ceramics, through their physical resilience and social relevance, have become a persistent indicator of cultural contact in Southeast Asia for over a millennium of the region's history. This lavishly illustrated historical survey includes introductions to technical and stylistic aspects of the ceramic traditions of China, Vietnam, and Thailand, over two hundred illustrations of stoneware and porcelain ceramics, and an extensive biography.