 Well, good morning and thank you everybody for those of you who've managed to make it here this morning. We just waiting for a few more to have registered to to to come into the room. A few hiccups with storms in the UK and very slow internet access. So once we're waiting for the rest to to come in. It's my pleasure this morning to welcome our speaker for this for this lecture, Agni Mokta. I'd like to introduce her briefly, and then we'll get started. Thank you Agni for providing this this this abstract. It's been said frequently in the narratives of pre modern Java, that the Bruntus River played a significant role in supporting the society, living in its basin, and to prosper from this. Not only did the river support agriculture by being the main source of irrigation, and it still does today, but it also provided an easy route for trade between inland and coastal areas up to the 19th, early 19th century. The lecture will show how people in the Delta interacted with the river and the coastal environment to understand the maritime cultural landscape formed by some by such interactions, and by emphasizing the river's role as a continuation of the ocean. The historical and epigraphic studies have contributed to this discussion about the cultural dynamics in the Bruntus River Delta, although incomprehensibly, whereas archaeological research is almost absent. While the archaeologists expressed interest in Bruntus River, the focus of their investigations have mainly been on terrestrial data from along the rivers upper and midstream. People review the studies previously conducted and describe the results of recent archaeological surveys and ethnographic study in the Bruntus River Delta to interpret the maritime aspects of pre modern society included in this interpretation of the ancient river system and the types of vessels used to navigate the river and the ocean. A little bit about Agni, she lives in Yogyakarta in Indonesia. She's a PhD candidate, the Department of Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean at the University of Naples Oriental. And she's a researcher at the regional agency for archaeological research in Yogyakarta special region. She received her bachelor's degree in archaeology from Universitas Garjamada in Yogyakarta, and she continued her study in with a master of maritime archaeology at Flinders University in South Australia. This was titled the seventh century, Punjab Harjo boat from Indonesia, a study of the early Southeast Asian lashed lug boat building tradition, and she was awarded a prize in 2018 for best thesis. And her latest work is this investigation of maritime cultural landscapes in Bruntus River East Java. And we look forward now to hearing from you, Agni, for the next 40, 45 minutes and then it'll be followed by questions. So thank you, Agni. Thank you Heidi for the introduction. I'm very honored to be invited to this seminar series. I know that a lot of scholars had kind of like presented their works and they were amazing and I hope all of you will also enjoy my presentation today. So, I will start my presentation. Let me share my screen first. Can you see it clearly. Yes, you can. Yeah, cool. Yes, so first of all, good morning. Good afternoon, good evening depends on whatever you're joining from. It is 6pm in Jakarta right now. And luckily today is a good day, no rainings so hopefully there will be no trouble with the internet connections. So, yeah, today I'm talking about the highway to prosperity about the Bruntus River Delta in prominent pre-modern Java. As we said before, I am a PhD student at the University of Naples Orientali. I'm also a researcher working previously for the Ministry of Education and Culture and we now move to the National Agency of Research and Innovation in Indonesia. So before this project, basically, I will kind of like to talk about the maritime cultural landscape studies on the Bruntus River Delta, and of course I didn't do it alone. I was accompanied by an excellent team who worked really hard on this project and we try to kind of like understand the role of the Bruntus River in the connectivity between the island and the coastal area in pre-modern Java. Overall, I will start with the introduction and then move on to background and talk quite a lot about the prevailing knowledge and so what we kind of like learn further from these projects and then a few remarks to kind of like close this presentation. We start with the introduction. This is the map, if you are not familiar with Indonesia. The Bruntus River is on the east Java here and the Delta is around Surabaya and Pasuruan. Basically, the rectangle was our study area and you might read, I will mention about the solar river also a little bit and because these two rivers are the two longest river in Java. They have played as a key factors for the kind of cultural development seems like the early century of this millennium. So the Bruntus River project or Bruntus Maritime project, it was initiated in 2019. So about three or four years ago, it was funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture. I was still in the Regional Agency for Archaeological Research in the Ereistimewa Yogyakarta province and we did the first fieldwork in 2019. Unfortunately, of course, we couldn't do it in the 2020 because of the pandemic, but we did a desk based study and then we were able to kind of like do the second fieldwork of last year but it might sound a bit like weird when I kind of like say the desk based study of course each fieldwork was kind of like started with the desk based study before we went to the field but like it's just kind of like to show that we did the best we could during the pandemic when we couldn't go to the field. What we did for the project, so we did the Terrestrial and Underwater Archaeological Survey, the Terrestrial Survey was conducted along the riverbank on the two main branches of the Bruntus River, named Kalimas or Gold River and Kaliporong River and also we did site scan sonar survey and we also did ethnographic study, we visited the shipyard traditional shipyards to kind of like see how the tradition was it still kind of like continue until today or completely different with what people did in the past. Of course we also kind of like consult it with all the references that we could grab reports articles and books and the archive, the old maps and photos, mainly from the Dutch collection. So start with the Bruntus River so the Bruntus River was kind of like well acknowledged started in the 10th century, when the economic and political centers of kind of like the society shifted to East Java. I didn't say that before the 10th century there there was nothing in East Java, of course not. There were already people living there and we can see it from inscriptions and also temples and other archaeological remains found. They kind of like provided us with evidence of settlements in East Java, but we can say from the historiography before they're like like the main kingdoms in Java at the time prior to the 10th century. We're concentrated on the central Java and then in the 10th century they kind of like move to East Java and one of the earliest archaeological proof, so to say, it's the Anjukladang inscription you can see the pictures over here. It tells us about the victory of the Mataram Kingdom King who defeated the king from the Malay kingdom and then the stone was erected to kind of like celebrate their victory. And like I said, by the time the two main rivers, the Solo River and the Bruntus River, had been the key factor to flourishing trade and system, so I think one of the reasons why the kings move their kind of like political center to East Java is also to kind of like move closer to the already established trade system and the trade system itself was florist around the river system, either the Solo River and the Bruntus River. And about the delta itself, so the downstream of the Bruntus River. It was first mentioned during the Ayurlanga Kingdom around the 11th century. You can see here on the right hand side of the presentation. It's a statue of Toth as kind of like the symbol of Ayurlanga depicted as the Garuda Vishnu Kenchana, so Vishnu who is sit on top of the Garuda. The kingdom itself was then divided into two. It's quite a famous story in Java actually about the division of the kingdom. The two kingdoms associated with each downstream branches of the Bruntus River. The Kalimas, this one Kalimas is goes all the way to the north and ends in Surabaya and for Kaliporong, it flows to the east to the Madura Strait. And so why did we decide to kind of like focusing on the delta? Because before that the epigraphy and manuscript studies has been really really did it in the delta starting 18th century, but unfortunately the archaeology studies was almost non-exist. Because most of the archaeological project was focused more on the upstream and the midstream and like I would say many of the Hindu-Buddhish archaeological projects, most of them are kind of like more kingdom oriented so the theme of the research wasn't kind of like well developed so like other things like maritime aspect of the society at the time wasn't well studied and also because there is a rapid development on the delta area and it was a challenge for us to kind of like did the survey especially toward the coastal area like in Surabaya so it's a big city right now so it was very difficult to kind of like did a survey and look for archaeological remains especially from the pre-modern era so we thought that it's a good thing that we started a project to kind of like gather data about the archaeological remains especially from the pre-modern era. And actually the project itself was kind of like did survey on the archaeological remains from the 11th to the 20th century but for this presentation I will focus only on the pre-modern era. Also because now we are in Indonesia we kind of like face a very different situation with the rivers many many rivers in Indonesia are not in a so good condition they are very highly polluted and like a lot of litters and everything and basically many people kind of like use the river to kind of like dumb everything and it's really bad and it's totally completely different with what happened in the past and we really want to kind of like study about you know the kind of like the shifting what happened in the past they kind of like change how people see the river drastically. And about the prevailing knowledge of course even though the archaeological studies were still scarcely done in this area. Like I said the epigraphy and also the manuscript studies did really good projects about this and the people in Java especially here are very familiar with what happened in the past at least from those two studies. And here you can see on the screen it is some kind of like the dioramas or models made in the 1970s about the building of a dam in the river to kind of like solve the problem of the flooding. So, it is a very famous stories and I will talk a bit more later, but we start about what so far has been done in the river, Brantas River Delta sorry. So, one of the famous topics is about the river in harbors. One of the inscription is called the Changu inscription you can see here from the 14th century, also known as the very chopped, the fairy chapter, it has been studied quite intensively. And in the inscription it was mentioned about the harbors or ports along the Brantas River and also the solar river but for today I will only focus for the ones on the Brantas River. Here I put the name of the villages where the harbors were given the kind of like a grant from the kings, not to pay the tax because they kind of like contributed significantly on the economic activities at the time. So, it was very interesting because people and scholars did a lot of research on this topic and kind of like discuss a lot and some of them start to look for where the modern location of these harbors. So, they kind of like look for the toponyms so the places that still have the same name with the one mentioned in the inscription, and they did a survey and look for other proof, other evidence, like artillery remains and kind of like built like a interpretation of where the harbors and the ports were in the 14th century. And this is kind of like the early scholarly work about that kind of investigation that I mentioned. So this is Colin Fells. He was a Dutch officer assigned to work in Java at the time or also in other parts of Indonesia actually. In the late 19th century, he kind of like survey and travel along the Brantas River on the delta and kind of like look for evidence of the old harbors, but I think he was mainly kind of like use the inscriptions as the as the basic of his investigation and look for the similarity and names. It's unfortunately still in black and white so but I will kind of like try to show you here. So the darkened spots are the places that he thought was the location of the old harbor and ports. So from here, and you can see the modern I mean at the time in the late 19th century, the river was here this is the modern stream. But Colin Fells kind of like noticed that all the places of the harbor were a bit southern off of the current stream a bit over here. So he kind of like he made a hypothetical stream, so to say so. For example like this the the modern kind of like the way where the river was divided this here, but he argued that in the past, or at least at in the 11th centuries, the, the branches should be kind of like divide over here. And so this is his hypothetical lines and the modern lines was over here so we can see that there was quite a significant changes of the river stream. And also, this one is is a bit overlooked many time, in my opinion about the watercraft used on the river and on the nearby ocean, but there is a work by Christie in 1982. One of the inscriptions that she studied was the D minus from my inscription from the 11th century. And in that inscription, it was mentioned over 40 types of vessels. The vessels were see going and also the river in boats and ships with this magnificent I think, and most of them were named after their function so the inscription mentioned different types of vessel for different fishes they catch, and also different tools they use when they did the fishing. And also whether it was for the river stream or for see going vessels. So, it was, it was a very extensive collections, so about the boats and the ship. But unfortunately, the inscription itself only mentioned the names of the type of vessels. It didn't mention anything about like the components of the boats or the ship so it was really hard to kind of like interpret how the boats and the ship look like in the past. And, and also, so this is like, like an upgrade from the inscriptions. Here, you can say from the book describing the first split of Cornelius the Holtman to Java, and in the 16th century. It depicts various types of boat and ships in Java. And if you are familiar with the very famous Borobudur reliefs about boats, you can see a lot of similarities here. For example, like the rectangle sails and also the moss over here. We, of course, we couldn't see like the inside constructions of the hull, but a lot of features that we can see here are similar to the one in Borobudur relief which is dated from the 9th century. And this is from the 16th century. So it was amazing to kind of like see how this kind of like features survive for like quite a long time. And this is also another very famous topic when we are talking about the Grandas River Delta it's about the water management. But this is like, I think it's the most famous inscription from the Delta it's called the Kamala. Okay, sorry, I think we may have lost me sound. Just wait a moment for her to come back in. Yeah, we're just waiting for me to reconnect. Hi, Agni. If you can reconnect, could you kindly turn your video off that might help the reception. Sorry, Heidi. Yeah, yeah, I lost my internet connection. Let me start again. Sure, just try and share your. When did you lost me. The Kamala gun inscription. This one. That's it. That's it. Okay. Thanks. Turn your video off. Thanks. Yeah, all right. Okay, I'm sorry everyone had the internet connection was really bad. So yeah, I'll start again with the Kamala again inscription. It is one of the, well, I think it's like the most famous inscription from the Delta. It was dated from the 11th century. It's also known as the collage and inscription. It's mainly talking about the building of a dam to control the flood, but as you can see here, it's, it's a quite a big stone and it has a lot of lines so it tells a lot of stories about the, the delta the communities around the Delta around the 11th century. It mentioned about how people was devastated because their pedifield were floated by the river. So they kind of like asked the, the king, the Ireland king to kind of like what should we do with this problem. And so the king decided to kind of like build them to kind of like control the flood. So until now, there's still a lot of debate about the location of the dam itself, because until now we couldn't find the, like the structure the actual archaeological remains of that structure so it is very still very interesting debate and discussion around this topic. But also, I put like a short chapter from the inscription. It is written in a copy script in old Japanese language so the language itself is already extinct so you don't have to kind of like worry if you don't understand whatever it says here, but more or less itself, it say that after they finish the building of the dam everyone were so happy and people coming from far away places on boats to kind of like sale their boats to the upstream of the river. And they kind of like gathered in one of the harbor called Hujungalu to kind of like do the trade, and they collect many stuff. And it was amazing to kind of like see how it was actually written that people were using the river itself to kind of like ask the transportation road. Sorry. Yeah, and so what we did for the project we acknowledge that many people had done magnificent work about the delta area, but we want to kind of like try approach this topic from the maritime cultural landscape perspective. And so we try to kind of like collect all the data and all the research result that has been done previously and we try to kind of like add what we found during the footwork also what we found during the literature review. So we, the first thing, and also the main thing that we did was we refitted the road so we kind of like visit nearly 200 places 200 sites and we collected all the coordinates and kind of like put it together you can see here on the map. All the all the places that we visited, and I mentioned earlier, the sites were approximately from the 11th to the 20th century, and we collected the coordinates and the data from the terrestrial sites along the streams. But and also the underwater remains, either the one on the riverbed and also near the estuaries, we couldn't survey this area because it is a very busy harbor today. It's in Surabaya, so it was impossible for us to kind of like, you know, dive or even did the site scans on our data. And, and after that, after we kind of like plot all the coordinates of the sites, and we overlay a lot of maps, actually, so we, we overlaid the maps made by Kalenfeld, I showed earlier about his interpretations of the location of the harbors. And we also studied a lot of inscriptions to kind of like add toponyms, places mentioned in the inscription. And we try to, from there we try to kind of like reconstruct the, the old reverse stream. It's quite different with the, the modern one, the current one. So here on the map, the, the blue lines are the current streams you can see over here, the two main branches of the river. I mentioned before this one is Kalimas, go up north to Surabaya, and this one is Kaliporong, goes eastward to Madura Strait. And the yellow line over here is the, what we interpret as the old stream. So we, we didn't say that what we see today is like completely new stream but because it's a delta and the river is kind of like, you know, very active and a lot of like small streams. So it was possible to kind of like the, the mainstream was kind of like changes along the centuries. And from, from what we gathered on the field here, I think there's there's one big issue that we want to kind of like address, because previously the scholars proposed that there was only like one main river stream. So they thought that the harbors and the ports were kind of like reflecting the mainstream of the river in the past. So there's only like one line. But from what we learned on the field, we argue that since, since in the past there were kind of like some, like a few streams so so there was, there was not the only stream used as transportation route at the time because you can see over here, Khaled fells in his map, kind of like draw these dots, because he couldn't find any like old stream over here and and we thought, well, there was none, there was none since the past so this one over here belong to the the small stream over here and so we were talking about like, like several routes of river stream use as transportation ways at the time. And from so also what we did during the field work that has that has not been done before. So we kind of like look for archaeological remains from underwater in the river bed and also from the seabed. So for the river bed, we, we only did the site scanner on the Caliporong so the one goes eastward because that's the only possible, possible river that we can, we can do this because the other one the one goes up north to Surabaya. So it is a very kind of like crowded area, and there are a lot of bridges and a lot of water controlling a structure so we couldn't really kind of like many for the boats to kind of like do the site scan so now so Fortunately, we the site scanner detected at least three possible shipwrecks on the river bed and for possible shipwrecks on the Madura Strait, Madura Strait, but we couldn't dive the river because it was like highly polluted. And I couldn't kind of like ask the diving team to to dive the water because like it was so too dangerous to kind of like do that. And the one over here on the right hand side was very close to the estuaries. The team dived there and it was a wooden ship, but we haven't done like more research on it so we can't kind of like tell you like the age of the ships and everything but it's a start and we are looking to kind of like do further research on this area. And we also kind of like did the ethnographic studies to understand the living traditions the maritime traditions survive from the past until now so we visited the traditional shipyard or boatyards and we learned that people there are still making or building their boats using the shell first construction technique and doles and three nails as primary fastening. We don't use sales anymore right now because they already using the engines to to power their boats and ships. So there is kind of like the lack of the data. It's fine, but you, we learned so much from our survey there, for example like how they using the doles and the system to kind of like put everything in place and how they have a very very good kind of like mental map to kind of like the shell first construction because of shell first construction. They don't have like frames to kind of like guide how they put the whole and it was amazing to kind of like see people like learning and like doing it still fully until now. And from there we kind of like the the interesting thing is because we also kind of learn about archaeological sites with like old wooden boats and ships. So we know that the traditions of using the doles or the three nails and also using the shell first construction kind of like survive until now and and it's it's quite amazing to kind of like learn about that. And you can see here this is their kind of like simple and traditional way to bend the planks, they use fire of course they fire the planks, and they tied it with the ropes and everything are still done in a very simple method and everything but they are very efficient. And also, they still kind of like do the river crossing activities using boats known as Tambangan if you recall the Changgu inscriptions mentioning about the river in harbors. The inscription also mentioned about Tambangan so Tambangan is derived from the words Tambang means the row. So they say the act of kind of like crossing the river using the ropes and boats is called Tambangan and today people still using that exact same words to kind of like describe the places they use to kind of like cross the river because this one over here. This is near the estuary of the Kalipurong the river itself is still like very wide up to like 200 meters wide. So, and they choose this kind of kind of like crossing the river gets it's very effective. It's done really fast and etc and yeah it's very very interesting to kind of like learn that people are kind of like unconsciously using the old words that probably they didn't know that the word itself was already in use like almost over 1000 years ago. And so from from all the data that we gathered, we try to kind of like combine everything and we try to kind of like put everything to kind of like interpret the maritime cultural landscape around the delta. And it can be seen clearly how organized the division of land use and landscape so we can see clearly that people in the past are very aware of their environment so I think I should go back a bit to sorry the map so it will be easier like over here. So the orange like dots over here are like a very crowded settlements and I thought that this is near the fishing, the fishing harbors so all the ships and boats used by fishermen with the other here and people who are coming to kind of like do the trading, all the passengers went like a bit further. Over here there's a big, there was a big harbor over here before they went beyond to the upstream area, and they can go is worth from from here or from from over here. There were a lot of options, a lot of effective routes they they could choose to kind of like navigate their area and also go to nearby islands, etc. And I will go back again. Sorry. Oh yeah. So, because of a lot of easy transportation routes. There was like almost non existence gap between the inland and coastal area because goods and people coming from far away places can easily kind of like navigate the stream to go to the inland area so there was no delay in kind of like changing goods or informations or other needs in the past. And we also kind of like notice that there was like a substantial changes along the river, especially after will just right after the end of the pre moderate pre modern era. In the late 19th century started from the 19th century is to the early 20th centuries. People started to attempt to control the transportation and recruit, because the, the field see the Dutch trading company came to this area and they kind of like build like a port near the Surabaya and then they want to kind of like control everything goes in and goes out at the time. And later on, mostly the Dutch colonial government introduced the modern water management structures, because the Brantas River it is, it is very. It's quite difficult to kind of like control the waters because like abundance of water. They are really good as a source for irrigations and also later to kind of like for the their industrial purpose but also there was a lot of transportation and everything. So they started to kind of like build like bridges and also them and everything. And just in the 20th century, it ended up with like, transportation was stopped because people couldn't sell the river anymore so they could only kind of like sale on short, short route from between one bridges to another, things like that. And of course, if you're familiar with the culture culture style so introduced by the Dutch colonial government, so the river was kind of like manipulated to serve the industrial purpose, especially the delta was very famous of their sugar factories. And since then, there was like a very drastic changes happen on the river and also on how people interacted with the river. So to kind of like close this presentation. I really don't like to conclude because I don't think this project is finished so we need to kind of like do more things but just a few remarks from what we have done so far it's already clear that the Chinatown cultural landscape was well structured and it is truly reflecting how people's perception of the environment they live in. And absolutely the Brantas river provided a very convenient channels to kind of like connect the inland and the coastal area. Why this area became so prosper because the distribution of goods of also the movement of people and also the ideas and everything and then also welfare, it was really easy to this river channel. And the system will well maintain during the pre-modern period, but later drastically change in the 19th to the 20th century. And of course, like I said, I didn't work alone. And thanks to the Maritime Brantas project team who worked really really hard on this project and also local government institution that we work with and also the cultural organization office in East Java, and a special thanks to the traditional boat builders in Pasuruan for sharing their knowledge about the boat building and everything, and also three organizations, our partner, every time we went to the field work for this project. And that's it from me. Thank you. Thank you. If you want to kind of like have a chat or you want to discuss everything and spatially, I am very, very willing to kind of like, you know, get all the critics or, you know, inputs and everything to kind of like better this project. Please do not hesitate to kind of like contact me on this email. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Agni, for that fascinating and really comprehensive also survey of what's been done to date. We have quite a few questions here, so we're going to move on swiftly now into the Q&A. I hope that, as you say, there's still so much work to be done. I hope that the experts in our audience today will weigh in here and bring in more to the discussion about what more we can do. This is the start of the top, really, the chat box here, and just to see. There's a question here from Leslie Pullen, who has asked something quite specific, can you estimate how many days it would have taken to sail from the Delta mouth to the heartland of the Zingasari area, say, for example, to Malang area. And also, is this area affected by tidal variations? Yeah, thank you for the questions. We've never done like kind of like experimental trial, you know, navigating the river and it's possible, it's impossible to do that today, but there are some manuscripts telling us about this, not to Malang but at least from Surabaya to Trawulan, so where the Majapai Kingdom was located. If I'm not mistaken, I have to check it again. It took them kind of like two days to kind of like navigate the river from Surabaya to Trawulan, to the capital of Majapai Kingdom, but it didn't say about were they doing it nonstop or did they stop along the way, but approximately, if I'm not mistaken, around two days from Surabaya to Trawulan. And I have no data to kind of like do it all the way to Malang. I hope that's answered the questions. Thank you. And the next question from Ian McCann. Agni, was there any physical evidence of any of the 34 ports? Like the port itself, there is not from the 34, so far we couldn't found it, but there is like one side that we want to in face to get more. I think it was also an old harbor, but it's not mentioned in that specific inscription, but it was mentioned on another inscriptions. So there's one possible site that we are planning to kind of like work on in the future. It's a high possibility that it is an old port. Okay, thanks. Third question, is the Siduajo mud flow destroying any archaeological evidence? Is it changing the flow of the river at all? Yes. So the Sidescans on our survey we did on Kaliporong, it was the river where the mud was kind of like, so the mud was sent to that specific river. So we learned from the Sidescans on our result. It was difficult to kind of like identify what is on the riverbed. We could only like, you know, identify three possible shipwrecks and because from another area, it's in Kandiri, so a bit more midstream of the river, people like found a lot of like small objects from the riverbed, like so, so many like very good artifacts from the riverbed, but that didn't happen on the Kaliporong river because I believe they were covered by the mud and because of the mud from Siduajo, we couldn't dive that water because it's just too dangerous for us. Interesting. Okay, and here's a question from Veronica Vadio who I think was not able to stay to hear your answer, but she's going to listen to the recording afterwards. She's saying, I was wondering if you have compared the flood plain surface area with the archaeological sites or traditional settlement patterns. As in the Mekong, people tend to remain just outside the flood plain. And a second question. I'm also finding very interesting things related to flood plain fishing traditions, which is part of maritime landscapes. Have you included this in your research or are you planning to do it at some point. Yeah, yeah, I'm quite familiar with Veronica's work on the flood plain on the Mekong. I think it's a bit different situation with what we have in Brantas Delta, because the stream like changes quite intensively along the the centuries. So I think also that that made the flood plain was kind of like also shifting. But during the survey, we did find like the Hindu and or Buddhist temple, like very, very close to the river stream. So, and also, like from from from a later period from around the 19th century, people were building their houses, like straight in front in front of the river, or exactly on the river bank. And it's, I think we have a very completely probably not completely, but I think slightly different situation because people, people didn't avoid, didn't avoid the river, and they are kind of like, okay, with kind of like staying on what should be the flood plain of the river. Okay. Okay, and we have another question here. Apologize if this question is very simple but at any point in history was the solo were the solo and Brantas rivers, sharing a single catchment area, or rather if these rivers had had they ever met in their northward course. No, that's that's the question. No, actually, the, I believe, near near the near the coastal area on East Java, the two rivers do share the water catchment area but they, they never kind of like me the stream so so. Yeah, you know, there's no one point where the two river meet each other, but in several places, they're quite close so they share the water catchment area. Okay, and then there's a comment here thank you for this informative presentation I've been very interesting. This research covers a very wide area of time from the classical period of Indonesia to the recent time. What has become, what are the difficulties, while conducting this research and how do you maintain and keep focus, while the data is very abundant. Thank you. So, we, we discussed about this kind of like the era that we are working on, and it is true that it's it's quite, quite a long period from the 11th to the 20th century. But we, we decided to kind of like do this because we, we want to catch. When did the drastic, the gestrical chains happen. So if we are only focusing on, like, for example, maybe during the Majapahit Kingdom era or only on the Dutch colonial era, we can't do that because we want to catch the, the, the process. What happened in the past and why the, the situation in the past completely different with what we have now so that's why we kind of like decided to have this long period. And then it is difficult. So we want one, one challenge that we kind of like notice that we can't kind of like focus on, on a very specific area, or one specific, like time period. So, but this is, we want this as a pilot project so we kind of like gather like so many data, but rather briefly, and we kind of like encourage other people, or maybe even our team in the future to kind of like choose more focused, smaller topics, but for, for this pilot project we kind of like wants to catch like the big picture first, what happened in the past that caused the, the, the drastic change of how people interacting with the river. Sure. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, there's a question here from Sarah Ward. Agni thanks for sharing your field results. Research in the pandemic is challenging and you've done well. Will you be doing any geomorphological, geomorphological research to determine where the river was at the different points in history so you can correlate that with the sites you are finding and from each period. Yes, definitely Sarah. Thank you very much. That's also one of the plans that we are want to work on in the future because we, we kind of like acknowledge that like, well our dream is to kind of like the to date, where the possible changes of, of the river, but we'll see yeah there's one thing that we don't have enough data, the geomorphological geomorphological data so yeah we are planning to do that in the future thank you Sarah. Thanks, and I had a question and this comes back to your, your topic close to your heart, your master's work thesis. The lashed lug boat building tradition is so seems to be so ubiquitous in this area and a kind of a way of building that it's really sustainable and really long lasting. And it must have been really important to people at the time to, to build boats that they knew would go on maybe being used for several generations I don't know how, how does the boat that you, the one in the northern Java area. You studied, how does that compare with evidence from the border or even earlier from for example the Pontian river in Pahang in Malaysia. How does, how does it compare. Yeah, so from, from the archaeological sites, we know that the less luck boats survive, like, at least until the 15th to 16th century, but, and, like, I think I did several times and also other scholars did it also to kind of like compare the similarities with what we found on the Borobudur relays and everything. Of course, we, the, the, the last luck is like one of the main character is like inside the hull and from other types of evidence like depiction or relief we, we can't see the inside that's the main challenge, but we do kind of like find similarities in features that we can observe. So there's, we kind of like quite certain that they kind of like share. And I think a lot of similarities but in, if I mentioned in the, the, the Delta area itself, until now, we haven't found any archaeological remains in terms of both remains. But there's a shipwreck, we don't know we should kind of like go diving again on the shipwreck we found on the, on the Madura Strait, let's see. Yeah, it's, it's like you say it's, it's amazing that kind of like the Borobudur relays are quite similar with the picture I showed earlier from the 16th century. So, we know that people kind of like using the same tradition for quite a long time. And I think there, there is a high possibility that the boats depicted either on the Borobudur relays or on the depiction from the later period were built using the last technique. And is there any correlation with the, with the shell first technique you mentioned earlier. Yeah, yeah, so the, the, the last, the last lab boats were built using the shell first technique so it's amazing to see that people still building the boat using that technique so the one we visited the shipyards we visited near the delta in Pasurwan. They don't use less luck anymore, but they still building it with the shell first construction, so some features are still maintained, but some others are completely gone. Yeah, do you think it was, it's particular, this kind of technique is particular, particularly suited to these kinds of conditions these riverine delta kind of sailing conditions. Yeah. Well if we are talking about the specific less luck ships and boats. Interestingly, many of the, the archeological sites that has less luck boat remains or ship remains. They are associated with river stream. So it's, it's really interesting to kind of like see the connection between two of them I haven't done something like very deep in terms of how this type of boats and ships are related to the river but but there's there's a fact that yeah, like most of the sites are close to the river. Yes, that Pontian boat was in a river, the Butuan boat in the Philippines as well. Interesting. Okay. hunger did you have a question. If you did please jump in. I can see you're still there. You have a comment here from Greta Adianti, who says that she lives near the Brantas River to long ago and she says thank you very much for your interesting talk, especially the living tradition of making boats. I'm amazed how great the tradition is in the past. Thank you Greta. Thank you. I think, were there any other comments and questions oh yes there's one more here. You talk of ports at the estuary of Caliparong. Can you talk a little more on this I'm interested as to the trade in the Singasari and Majapahit period, as to how the goods were trans shipped from the coastal to the river boats. For example, we know at the Musi River in Sumatra, there were no real ports as all goods were trans shipped. So yeah, the one possible harbour site near the estuary of Caliparong. It's called the Raus Pacinan, you can see, you can like Google on the Google Maps and you can see it actually we've visited there and there is one inscription saying that King Vijaya from Majapahit crossing that specific area. So he crossed the river there and when we visited the site, we thought that oh it's a very, very strategic place to kind of like have a harbour there and from the information from the local people. They kind of like saw brick structures near where we surveyed and I think we think that that is a very good location for harbour and we are planning to kind of like, I think we have to kind of excavate the site to kind of like see the actual structures of the harbour. Okay, thanks and I think we have time for one more question. Oh, there are a few questions here from Asiadi. Let's see. Let's take one here. It's a question about the relationship between upstream and downstream in material culture. I'm trying to understand which what the question is about actually because there are sort of like four parts to this. The reference to theory by Miriam Stark about river civilisations, what kinds of rivers influence material culture in the pre-modern period. Down, I presume that means downstream control, the transportation in the Brantos River, in the Brantos River, how about what kind of upstream control did they have? Do you understand this question about downstream and upstream? I'm reading it on the chat. Yeah, so from my getter from the questions. Because our main survey area is on the downstream, the delta, so a lot of the answer I will give will kind of like mostly downstream oriented answer. Like you say here if the down control transportation in the Brantos River, of course like the most strategic kind of like first step to control the transportation is kind of like controlling the coastal area. So the first stop of people coming and also the last stop of people going from the inland. So it's a very, very understandable strategy to kind of like control the downstream of the river. If someone wants to kind of like see what happened there because well specifically if we are talking about the Dutch trading company, the POC, they kind of like want to control the trade between the people in Java and the people from outside of Java. And it's really understandable that they kind of like want to control Surabaya at the time. And I think that's about the control and what kind of relation between the downstream and upstream. I don't really like understand what you are rebring to. But of course, at the time, the upstream area kind of like provided a lot of commodities to be to be brought to the coastal area and then be traded to people from coming from other places and and also vice versa. If, if goods or commodities coming from outside of Java, it was kind of like easy to kind of distribute all the goods up to the the upstream area. I hope that can answer the questions. Thank you very much for fascinating talk and answering so many questions. Thank you to the audience for all your questions. And you can see that we posted the link to the recording of this session. So I hope you'll encourage all your friends and colleagues to to access the link. Yes, thank you in saying great presentation many thanks coming in now. I'd just like to end this session by saying that we are planning to have the workshop, the full day workshop on the 18th of May. Finally, as a hybrid session of this year has been postponed for some time now due to the pandemic. And so you will have seen a mail shot I think in the last couple of days, biographies and restitution of Hindu and Buddhist objects from Java, Sumatra and Bali. There'll be an updated email alert going out quite soon as well about the venue because that's changed slightly. But if you're thinking about coming to London at all, please do consider this event it will be very much in person, as online. We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible attend one of the first workshops to go back to the hybrid state of being at SOAS this year. Okay, so once again, thank you very much, Agni, for your time and I hope everyone will be in touch with you soon with more questions. Thank you everybody. Goodbye. Thank you.