 Thank you everyone for coming today. We are having Hunter Watson for a speaker today. Hunter Watson is a PhD candidate at the National University of Singapore working under the supervision of Professor John Mixley. His primary research area is Thailand and surrounding countries. His main interests are epigraphy and archaeology. Hunter holds an MA in oriental epigraphy from Silapha College University in Bangkok. And where he studies and script, Khmer and Mon and the development of ancient scripts in South and Southeast Asia. His doctoral research is an investigation of Hauravati and neighboring cultures with a focus on script development and art artifacts including the machakras, semastones, motif tablets, points and ceramics as well as settlement patterns and interactions we are in ancient mainland Southeast Asia. And we were pleased to have you today and thank you for staff of the Southeast Asian Academy program for funding these events. Please welcome Hunter. Thank you. I'm glad that all of you could make it here this evening and I would like to thank the organizers for giving me the opportunity to come present my research for you. In the back can you hear me alright? Okay if I get too quiet just flag and I'll try to speak a little more loudly. So we're going to talk tonight about the first millennium of Thailand and I'll be speaking about Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia and I understand that it's a bit anachronistic to use these terms because of course these nations didn't exist in the first millennium but I'm going to use these words nevertheless just to make it convenient when I'm talking about the geographical spaces. So we look at the history of Thailand. Really the earliest Thai kingdoms we generally view them as being around the 13th century and everything before that is seen as the pre-Tai period which of course most Thai scholars tend to pay less attention to they're more interested in super-Tai and Ayutthaya and what came after that. But the few centuries before this are often referred to as the Lopberi period in Thailand mainly because they don't want to call it the Khmer period but the art and iconography in that period as I'm sure most of you are aware is more related to the Khmer cultural sphere. Before that we call the Tawarawadi period and the dates of the Tawarawadi period haven't really been nailed down. There's a lot of debate about what it is and it's usually identified as being related to the Maans or the Maan Ethno-Linguistic group. But there's a lot of debate about Tawarawadi. What was it? When was it? Where was it? Scholars debate about which terms to use when they refer to it and how big it was and how cohesive it was of a society and also scholars debate about you know exactly where the center of it was or if it had a center. And so this evening I won't be answering these questions but I'm going to try to explicate the debates on this topic a little bit for you and tell you a little bit about Maan inscriptions in Thailand. So for my impression and I say here my current impression because as I learn more and more I allow my ideas to be flexible. You know I don't want to be inflexible so when I find new evidence that indicates something different than what I thought before I'm happy to change my ideas on it. What I think now is that Tawarawadi was a specific urban center. I think it was a specific site and I think it was quite possibly at Nakhonpa-Tolm. I think that Tawarawadi we use as a term to refer to a cultural sphere of sites on the lower central plain of Thailand which had a very similar material culture and I think that it dates roughly to the second half of the 1st millennium. So again my name is Hunter. I'm from the United States but I've been living in Thailand for about 15 years and I do an MA in Xalapagong University in Epigraphy and after that my Thai professor said leave Thailand and so I didn't want to go too far and so I went to Singapore and I'm currently working on a PhD at the National University of Singapore. I'm in the Department of Southeast Asian Studies but as she mentioned I'm focusing more on archaeology and the focus of my dissertation I still want to work a lot with inscriptions so I'm looking at the development and the spread of scripts around Thailand, Laowen, Cambodia and the 1st millennium and I'm also looking at other types of artifacts and some of my patterning and ceramics and other things that will kind of help to contextualize the spread of riding throughout the region. So Tawarwadi. This is a Sanskrit term. Tawar means door and for those of you who haven't studied Sanskrit you might see that Tawar and door are strikingly similar phonetically and this is easy to explain because Sanskrit and English are both in the Indo-European language family and there are actually a lot of cognitive words between these two languages. Wabi is a feminine case in the name that we see for goddesses and for rivers or sites all throughout South Asia and Southeast Asia. So some people try to translate Tawarwadi as a gated city or a place which is a gate into something. I don't think this is really necessary. I don't think there's any need to try to say oh this name implies that it was a site that had walls and a gate even though if it was an important center it may have had some sort of fortifications but I don't think this is necessary because a lot of other ancient place names in the region of Sanskrit origin have other meanings which we don't take literally. So Amarawadi was not an immortal city. We think of Singapura, Simha the lion city. We know there were no lions in Southeast Asia. So for example Singapur and Singapore were not places where they had lions. Petraburri is not a location where we find diamonds and it's not a lightning city and so the same thing with Tawarwadi. I don't think there's any need to take it literally. On the contrary Sanskrit was a prestigious language in the past and so Sanskrit place names were borrowed into Southeast Asia to raise the significance of these sites. Many of the place names that we find in Southeast Asia are repeats of places which were already used in India and even in the region of Southeast Asia these place names got repeated and so from inscriptions we have seen the name Tawarwadi in records in what is now Amar and in Cambodia referring to sites which we don't associate with Tawarwadi in Central Thailand. And so in fact we can talk about multiple Tawarwadis in ancient Southeast Asia. Of course today we're just looking at the one in Thailand. So here I created a digital elevation model of Southeast Asia so we're looking at the topography of the region because I think this will help contextualize where I'm going forward from this. This here is known as the Central Plain so it's a relatively flat-blood plain in Central Thailand. This is the Korat Plateau in Thailand it's usually called Isan but I prefer to refer to it by the geographical region of the Korat Plateau. The reason being is that when we refer to Isan in Thailand it stops at the Thai border Mekong River but actually the Korat Plateau geographical region extends well past the river into lowland Lao and many of the artifacts and the objects that we find related to the ancient culture on the Korat Plateau are found in both what is now Thailand as well as in what is now Lao and so I just look at this as a cohesive area of the Korat Plateau. We've also got the Chiang Mai Lampuan Basin in Northern Thailand which is the largest river basin in the North and therefore was a convenient place in the past for large-scale agriculture and then in Southern Thailand we have the Peninsula Region which I'll touch on just briefly. So the main two cultures which scholars think about when we talk about monistrictions in Thailand are Tawarawadi and Hari Puen Chai but again Tawarawadi is debated. Some people say it was in Central Thailand, some people say Central and on the Korat Plateau, some people even include Northern Thailand and some scholars even like to throw the Peninsula Region into the mix and so there's a variety in the spatial expanse of what people think was Tawarawadi. There's also debate about what sort of society it was and the root of this really comes down to the art historians and the archaeologists are looking at different things and so when they look at the thing they're setting and they say the Tawarawadi period that may not match the period set forth by the other field of social scientists. Then Hari Puen Chai, there's less debate about Hari Puen Chai was a later kingdom in a kingdom I'd use loosely of course in Northern Thailand here. So looking at inscriptions in Thailand, we find inscriptions written in a variety of languages most of these are in Thai Khmer, Mon Sanskrit and Pha Le. Of these the majority are in Thai Khmer, Sanskrit and Pha Le and it is for this reason that most people in Thailand who study inscriptions they prefer to study these languages. When I was doing my MA my paleography professor pointed out that there were quite a number of old Mon inscriptions that had been found. People weren't studying them most Thai students tended to not be interested in them because it's a small corpus of texts and Mon is not a state language today and so if they graduate and aren't working with epigraphy it's hard to find work with Mon language. So my professor said Hunter why don't you study this because no one else is working on it. And so I said that sounds like a good idea. So let's look at Mon inscriptions. So again just an overview here we've got Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia Mon inscriptions we find in six different geographical areas, three of them in modern Myanmar and three of them in modern Thailand and when I began my study I said I'm going to study all of them and my MA supervisor said slow down. He said you know let's narrow the scope down because I was limited in time. He said let's just focus on what's in Thailand first. And so there are a lot of old Mon inscriptions in Myanmar. I haven't studied them too in depth and my presentation today will just be focusing on evidence we found in Thailand. So in Thailand we can basically break old Mon inscriptions into three different temporal periods. Most of the Mon inscriptions in Thailand are not dated but we date them approximately based on the script style. These script styles are referred to as the Palava script, the post Palava script, and the old Mon script. Here I've put all these in quotation marks because these terms are all highly controversial and epigraphers these days are all debating on why we use these names and what other names would be better and everyone argues about any suggestion that's made so we're kind of in a stalemate at the moment. Palava script of course is making reference to the Palava kingdom in South India. The earliest script styles all throughout Southeast Asia, Maritime and Mainland were very similar to scripts of South India and in the past the connection was drawn most closely to the Palava kingdom but it's not actually accurate because they also display similarities to other scripts from South India and also it's misleading because the Palava script was a script used in South India which had a different history of its own and so when we say the Palava script in Southeast Asia it's actually kind of a misnomer by trying to identify these two together. As it developed from that we call it the post Palava script which is not really appropriate for the same reasons and then Mon script is also not really inappropriate because the script that was used for the later Mon inscriptions was also later used for Burmese etc and so it wasn't just used for the old Mon language. Now the scripts we can break here basically the 6th to 7th century to 8th to 10th century and 11th to 13th century in the first period you notice inscriptions were only found on the Central Plain in the second period they're found on the Central Plain and on the Kaurai Plateau and on the third period they're found only in Northern Thailand so just to give you something to look at the earliest script style the script tends to be more elegant and we can say like more cursive a lot of the letters have longer features and have more decorative designs in the second phase there's a great simplification of the script style in general and by the third phase they begin to take a very round shape which leads us to the later Mon script. This is an image from a manuscript and for any of you who have looked at Burmese you notice it's very similar. The Mon script and Burmese script are almost identical. Some differences are with the subscripts some of the subscripts are a little bit different. The Burmese script is often described as like circles or bubbles and I read in so many places that these scripts were so-called bubble scripts because straight lines would tear through the manuscript and I don't know who started saying that but I don't agree with that because even this script style has straight lines and if you look at other languages which are used in palm leaf manuscripts in Southeast Asia they have straight lines also so I'm not sure who started that but I don't think it's justified to say that it's just because straight lines would break through the paper. So to give you a map to look at here in the first period the old Mon inscriptions are on the lower central plain and more off on the western side. By the second period they kind of spread a little bit more on the central plain and then far to the northeast onto the Karat Plateau and extending into Laos and then by the third period we find an isolated pocket in the Chiang Mai Leng Kun Basin. While I'm on it I'll note Nekwansi Tamarat in the Peninsula region, Southern Thailand. And I mentioned this here because there are two inscriptions from Nekwansi Tamarat which refers in the 1980s identified as Old Mon and their claim has been repeated and repeated and repeated and because of this anyone who talks about Tawarawadi I should say anyone, most people who talk about Tawarawadi they include Southern Thailand and they include Southern Thailand based primarily on the claim that their Old Mon inscriptions found in Southern Thailand. There are only two and I can tell you unequivocally they are not Mon they are disidentified in the 80s. And so any claim that says Tawarawadi was in the south it may be valid but you need to judge it based on all the evidence there not based on the claim of Old Mon inscriptions. So I've given presentations where I've said this before there are no Mon Old Mon inscriptions in Southern Thailand and then in the Q&A I have people say oh so you're saying there were no Mon's in the south and I said no such thing. I said that we have not found any inscriptions which were written in Old Mon. So there could be maybe we haven't found them yet but the ones that were identified in the past were misidentified they're not Old Mon. So let's just get that out there. I have identified a little over 100 artifacts in Thailand inscribed in Old Mon. So here I'm standing next to it for scale. This is one of the largest ones and this one's quite large. It doesn't seem here it goes actually into the base that it's standing here. This one's large and it has a writing on two sides of it. This one on the right here is about the size of your thumbnail. So it's a little ceiling but it only has two words. And so the point that I want to make here is that although I have identified over 100 artifacts in Thailand inscribed in Mon, don't get this idea that there's 100 big stone inscriptions. Most of them are very very short messages. There are only a few of them which are large like this. And so whereas for example when we think about inscriptions in Cambodia, the Khmer has produced a lot of really large inscriptions very long inscriptions on door jams or on stalei. For Mon, that's not the case. At least not in Thailand. There are very few large stalei and most of them tend to be either small artifacts or large artifacts with small or short inscriptions written on them. So for those of you who don't know anything about studying inscriptions we tend to make ink rubbings or estimpage where we take paper and we put it on the inscription and spray some water and then spread ink on it. And we do that because we don't take the inscriptions back with us to study at the university but we can take the rubbings. You know the inscriptions we leave them on site or at the temple or at the museum or something like that. Sometimes the inscriptions are not too clear and by making an ink rubbing it can actually be a little bit easier to read them. And so if I have access to an ink rubbing, I photograph the ink rubbing. If I can find the actual inscription, I photograph the inscription because sometimes the inscription is more legible than the rubbing and sometimes vice versa. And so if possible I like to have images of both. That way I can compare between them when I'm making my proposal on a reading of the message. Another technique that we use when looking at inscriptions is to take chalk powder and smear it onto the inscription and then clean it off except for what's in the letters. I think the mouse is on screen there a little bit. This is useful because when letters are carved into the stone actually the letters are the same color as the stone so they don't always stand out clearly. So by using chalk powder like this it can make the letters stand out quite noticeably and if you see inscriptions in museums that are white like this that's chalk powder. So a few pictures for you to look at. In the first period not so many inscriptions. Again only on the central plane. And as I flip through my pictures I want you to remember what I said about the messages being very short. This one we don't know how large it was because it's broken on four sides. So it's a fragment from like the middle of the inscription. It has writing on both sides This is it. The mouth of a cave in Sarrapuri. It's a three line inscription. This one's actually quite interesting. It talks about a local ruler and his queen having a procession with the villagers singing and dancing and going to the cave for some sort of ceremony. But it's only three lines. It's quite short also. And then a lot of the inscriptions look something like this. So somebody got merit for something. We don't know what they just told us someone got merit. A lot of the moninscriptions tend to be like this. So here's one on the base of a statue and it's just a one line text that I think it has to do with like maybe a prince having a dedication for after his father passed away. In the second period we find a few different types of artifacts inscribed. So this is a what's often called a votive tablet or a clay ceiling. And so that's my hand. You can see it's quite small. It's only about this large and on the back it has two short lines of text. This artifact is often called a miniature stupa although some people debate exactly what it was meant to represent. Some people think it was a finial but I don't think so. And this has two lines of text you see on top the first line and the first half of the second line is a Pali yetama kata. And then there's a short followed by a short inscription mon that says that the ruler got married for building a this one's interesting because when I went around to museums around central Thailand I found a lot of these artifacts and as some of the museums I asked them what is this where is this from and they say we don't know when we founded the museum the we're not sure what it is. So when I photographed all these artifacts and started reading them they all had the same message and almost all of them had the same handwriting. And so I actually published a paper on this group because I think not only did they all originate in the same place but I think they've made them all for the same occasion. There's actually a large number of these that have been found that don't have inscriptions but they're all about the same size and shape. There's also a few similar looking ones from the Konpochon but they're much larger and they're not inscribed in mon. So clay ceilings is the one I showed you before that's quite small and then this one's a nice octagonal pillar from Lotbari it's not so short message it has four messages in total one side and another two messages on the opposite side. And then on the crop let's show we see a lot of these sema stones which might have one line of text or maybe three lines of text or four lines of text but not a lot it's short messages generally just saying that such and such got merit for doing something. Again here's one that has one line and then a couple letters of the second line. Some of these sema stones are decretively carved. This one is a motif on top and then in the center here you see a larger figure and a smaller figure seated and below them there are two lines of text which I've enlarged up top here. And then there's this same stone also which is the only mon inscription in Thailand which has a numerical date which neatly fits right into what we would classify bibliographically 8th to 10th century and this is the 8th century. There are a few of the other mon inscriptions in Northern Thailand that have dates but not numerical dates. It has astrological dates so this is the only clear date that we have written on a mon inscription in Thailand. On the coral plateau we also have a number of these clay ceilings. This one's about 10 centimeters tall and on the back it has an inscription not etched but written with like red pigment or red paint of some sort and most of these the paint is kind of worn off but I plan to go back to the museum and try to take new photographs and maybe process it with de-stretch and see if I can pull the color out a little bit more. We found a lot of these. They're all from the same site, all from mahasa.com In the third period again inscriptions we only found in the north. They tend to be quite large. This is where we find the real nice ones that have a lot of content for us to study. So again this is the same one on the left is the inscription on the right is the ink rubbing. In the north we also find some clay tablets. These are also about 12 centimeters tall and there's a one line inscription on the bottom which is the name of a monk or a figure from Buddhist literature and several of these have been found and the name on every one of them is a different name. So summarizing the old moninscriptions in Thailand they're predominantly Buddhist in nature primarily their records of donation and merit making and I say primarily because a few of them like the one that's a ceiling it could just be someone's personal name so it doesn't necessarily have a connotation of a Buddhist merit making but when I say predominantly and primarily I mean like 98% almost all of them are Buddhist and they're about merit making and donations. Quite a few of them list names because of course the people who's doing the merit meritorious act they want to have their name recognized in a few of them we have place names and I think this is interesting because there aren't a lot of place names from the first millennium that we have the names for and there haven't been many people that have been looking at these place names and so I'm actually working on a paper on this topic now. There are a few references in these northern moninscriptions which refer to historical events. Two examples there's reference to an earthquake and a subsequent renovation of a stupa which was damaged in the earthquake and there's also reference to a religious ceremony where they took a floral umbrella and a palm leaf manuscript and interred these into a cave but based on the wording of the text it might actually be like a cave it might have been some sort of building that they made but the name is can be translated as a cave and so it's not really clear but I think this one's kind of interesting because we can almost visualize it. They talk about a floral umbrella and a palm leaf manuscript and even today floral umbrellas are still produced in Northern Thailand on Mulberry paper and all over Southeast Asia we're familiar with palm leaf manuscripts so it's not something that's so far away that we can't picture it it's also interesting because these palm leaf manuscripts if you take really good care of them you might get them to last for two or three centuries but of course from 800 years ago they would have disintegrated but from the inscription we know that they did have palm leaf manuscripts at that time they were already producing them. The word that they used in the inscription is the same word that is used in modern mon. So again I found over 100 artifacts in Thailand and this number continues to increase when I go to museums and I find other things which haven't been published. There are some inscriptions in Thailand which have been identified as other languages for example Sanskrit and then when I study them I think they're actually old mon and so that could add to this number and then there are a few inscriptions in Thailand which other scholars have claimed are mon which I think are not. Most notably the two from the south which I already mentioned I do not think are mon and other people don't think they are either but there are some people that will hold on to that and continue to argue it. So moving on to some debates about Tawarawadi what was it, when was it and where was it? And another question I want to ask is is it appropriate for us to identify Tawarawadi with the ethnolinguistic group of the mon's which is something that's really prevalent in all the literature and I don't think it's justified and so I'm going to try to share some of my thoughts with you on this topic. If you go on to the Internet and you do a Google search of Tawarawadi you will find this image. I don't know where it came from it's a little hard to agree with but this is what I would say the general population thinks when they think of Tawarawadi. If you go to the Bangkok National Museum they have a map of Tawarawadi sites and I took this on my phone so it's not real clear and so I recreated this map in ArcGIS and here you see of course I've marked the crapplet Korat Panto in yellow and I've dropped points everywhere here that they marked points and you see there's a cluster in the lower Central Plain and then across the crapplet toe and then they've included Haribuchai and they've included Southern Thailand. So this is the official stance of the Fine Arts Department of Thailand. This is what they call Tawarawadi sites and this is what most archaeologists in Thailand would argue are Tawarawadi sites. Again the one on the Internet doesn't exactly match it this one here doesn't include the South. It also includes some areas that they don't account for here. So not consistent in what it was or where it was. There is high inconsistency with the terms that people use when they refer to Tawarawadi. Early on they were saying it was an empire and then they said it was a kingdom and then a state and sometimes you'll find a work that in like within two sentences they'll use three or four. It was a kingdom or a state or an empire. I think that the question here is not about what exactly it was. I think it's more a question of how do you find these terms. Because I've noticed that in all of these texts when they call it an empire or they call it a kingdom they don't follow up by defining what they mean by a kingdom. And most of these words have loaded meaning. And so if I say okay I'm going to call it a culture but I mean a culture in this sense. Well then you'll understand why I'm calling it a culture. But if I just say a culture and then you think well what does culture mean for you. Well everyone in here could have a different opinion about what exactly that is. And so I think part of the problem here is that people toss these words around without defining them. Another one, okay I'll just mention here. I don't think it was an empire because it wasn't consolidated enough. It wasn't centralized like the Khmer's were. I've identified as an ethnominguistic group which I'll move to in my next point. And I don't really think we can call it a state either because again it wasn't centralized. It doesn't seem it seemed to have been centralized. I think Tuwarawadi was more specifically a site. But I prefer not to use the word city because it also has a bit of a loaded meaning with some implications. I prefer to use the word or the term urban center. I think city also if you were to call something a city you have to define what exactly is a city and your terminology. How big is it? What's a population? What's the connectivity with other sites? Tuwarawadi period we hear a lot but there are different Tuwarawadi periods depending on if it's art historians or archaeologists or paleolinguists. And these don't match up in temporal span. And the Chinese records mention Tuwarawadi. But the Chinese records only mention Tuwarawadi for about a 200 year period or so. But the art historians, archaeologists and paleolinguists all refer to Tuwarawadi as being a larger span of time than that which is accounted for in Chinese records. And so again there's inconsistency here. And based on the actual evidence that we have for Tuwarawadi it seems that everyone else is taking it and stretching it into temporarily something that we don't necessarily have justified. The earliest studies of Tuwarawadi was I think really initiated by the French scholars who were working of course earlier in French Indochine in Cambodia and then they expanded into Siam. Samuel Bill in 1884 was the first one to mention this. Studying Chinese text he found a word in Chinese text which he transliterated as Tuwarawadi in Sanskrit. He was suggesting that it was Sanskrit, a reference to a Sanskrit place name. In 1901, Imonie made the first actual reference to an inscription in Thailand which we now know is Old Man. But Imonie didn't know that at the time. Because at the time they didn't know there were Old Man inscriptions. They knew there were Old Man inscriptions in Burma but not yet in Thailand. And of course the French scholars weren't studying Old Man. So Imonie identified this inscription. He said it's written in a pre-ankorian script. So it looked similar to what he was used to in Cambodia. But he didn't know the language. A couple years later Paul Pelliat said that Tuwarawadi, again Paul Pelliat was referring to Tuwarawadi that Samuel Bill had mentioned, which they didn't yet have solid evidence for. Paul Pelliat said that it may have been a polity either Mon or Khmer centered at Loparie. And about two decades later, Sadis was the first person that actually identified an inscription in Thailand as being written in Old Man. And that was the octagonal pillar from Loparie. He knew that Lavo was a center of Mon civilization. And I think this is really the point where the snowball starts to roll. Because after this Prince Damrung proposed that Tuwarawadi was a style of art. And then Sadis, who was working closely with Damrung labeled all of the art across the lower center plane as the art of Tuwarawadi. And then from there it just gained momentum. Lame and 38 said Mon's were the dominant race on the center plane. In 1945 they were labeled Tuwarawadi a Mon Kingdom. And then in 1951 Sadis said that some sites on the Carapace were also Mon. So I think in retrospect there are a few things that we can see going on here. First off is the tendency early on to label Tuwarawadi as something that was spatially large. There was also a tendency for them to identify it with the Mon ethno linguistic group. And to talk about it in racial terms. And I think that we have to be a little bit creative about the ways of thinking among late colonial era scholars. Especially referring to things like nations and ethnicity, sort of racial groups. And when we look at these early texts, especially Lame, some of the things from our modern perspective of academics, it'll make your jaw drop the way he talks about facial features and stuff like that. It's very loaded about their perception of race 100 years ago. The first actual evidence we had that was a place name in Thailand was with the finding of the first Tuwarawadi coin. Here we call it a Tuwarawadi coin. Some people say, oh it's not a coin because it wasn't used as a currency. We've only found it in like religious foundations and stuff like that. So some people try to call it a medallion. They don't want to call it a coin. For me I don't think that's a very serious debate because we can speak about commemorative coins, which are struck for ceremonies but not used as currency. So I don't think that's too particular. So I call it a coin or medallion, whichever one. So in 1964, there were two of these published, two of these first published and a bill using Sadis' reading and translation of Sri Tuwarawadi Suwarafunya. Sri Tuwarawadi can be a personal name or a place name, Sri of course, a little suspicious and go in his merit. And so this can be translated like the merit of the Lord of Tuwarawadi. One thing that's notable about this every publication you will read says that this is actually a Sanskrit message, which makes perfect sense because Sri is Sanskrit, Tuwarawadi is Suwarabunya, all four words are Sanskrit. For me I'm almost inclined to call it a mon inscription. And that may sound counterintuitive but all of these words would have been words which were borrowed into Old Mon. And from my experiences with studying ancient languages and languages in general once a word is borrowed, it belongs to that language, even if it originated in another language. And so even though all of these words were from Sanskrit, once mon borrowed and mon would have used them as mon words. Now the reason I think that it might be mon instead of Sanskrit is there's no conjunctions, there's no declensions, it's not following proper Sanskrit grammar, which is very abnormal. And so I'm more inclined to think it could be mon. Any paper you'll read that mentions these called some Sanskrit but recently I've been working with Peter Skilling and he agrees that it's possible to consider the big Old Mon. So after this find, Sades jumped back to his 1925 claim and he said, aha here we have cold heart evidence. And Sades said that Tuwarawadi was a mon population that spoke mon as the vernacular. And since then no one has really challenged him, it's just been repeated and repeated in the literature. These coins have been found a lot in the central plain, kind of scattered around. Most of them are in private collections and we don't necessarily know that they're all authentic and we continue to find more and more reports of these. Looking at where Tuwarawadi was, there's actually two questions. Where was the urban center of Tuwarawadi? Because I'm not inclined to think that Tuwarawadi would have been the name that was used for like a kingdom or an empire and a specific city would not have also had that name. You know, we see the tendency in Southeast Asia in the past that the name of a city gets projected to the larger society. And so I think Tuwarawadi must have been a specific site. But then we can also ask the question of what was the spatial extent for the culture for which it was a part of. And I say it that way because we don't necessarily know that Tuwarawadi controlled all the spatial areas where we find material culture which is related to Tuwarawadi. So here's a distribution of where we have found the coins. And here on the map I've actually used an image from the coin. And the reason I did that was because this map that I saw in the Bangkok National Museum had done that. They had actually taken images of coins and marked these as their places. And I found this is misleading for two reasons. Because on the map in the museum they say map of Tuwarawadi sites. But they don't explain to you. When I first looked at this map I said, oh these are the places where they found coins. That's not the case. That's not where we found coins. We've only found coins at this place. And it's also misleading because it includes Northern Thailand and Southern Thailand. And there's a lot of debates about whether these were actually part of Tuwarawadi. There is debate about where was the major settlement center. Some people think it was Utong. Some people think it was Nakhon Patong. There's evidence that Utong was older and it was certainly a very important site early on. And so like early in the 1st millennium, Utong may have been an important site. And then later in the 1st millennium Nakhon Patong may have become a more important site. A lot of people tend to think it was Nakhon Patong because there's a lot more evidence of the Tuwarawadi style art from there. And also the site was larger. Karen Mudar two decades ago she did a study of moded settlement sites on the central side where she looked at the size of the moats. And looking at the size of the moats she break them into a ranked hierarchy based on size. And among her ranked hierarchy she identified five centers which would have been large. She called them like large regional centers. And she identified Nakhon Patong as by far the largest site. And so she said if we have a ranked hierarchy based on the size of the moat alone it would seem to indicate that Nakhon Patong was the top dog in the region at that time. There are some things which we can debate about her argument. But it does fit in with a lot of what a lot of other people think. And I tend to think that Nakhon Patong probably was the most important site in the late 1st millennium. So here stars are the places where we have found coins. And again here we have Utong and Nakhon Patong. Both of which we have found Tuwarawadi coins. On the map I included here Loburi. At Loburi we have not yet found any Tuwarawadi coins. But I threw it up here on the map because some people argue that Loburi was Tuwarawadi. Or that Loburi was the most important site. I tend to not agree with this. For the main reason that we have a coin that reads La Wa Pura. And La Wa Pura is quite clearly Loburi. You could debate it, but it's pretty similar. Okay. For those of you who haven't studied languages, there could be free variation between what and what sound. And so that's not problematic at all. But that leaves Utong and Nakhon Patong, both of which have yielded Tuwarawadi coins. There is other epigraphic evidence for the name Tuwarawadi. This is a base of a Sandy Buddha statue, which is missing of course the rest of the statue. And here along the base there's an inscription that mentions Tuwarawadi. And this inscription actually mentions the queen of Tuwarawadi. Which led some people to say Muang Sema in Nakhon Rataseema province. Aha! That was Tuwarawadi. But this is not necessarily justified because it's talking about a queen of Tuwarawadi. And so it's possible that rather than being the seat of power of Tuwarawadi we have for example a princess being in an arranged marriage with a ruler of Muang Sema for political reasons. Because it doesn't mention a king. It's mentioning a queen of Tuwarawadi. Now most recently, and some of you may not have heard this news yet, just about, I'll say about five weeks ago, not quite, not two months ago, this is a new inscription which was just uncovered in Nakhon Patong. And it bears the name Tuwarawadi. Which is actually the first time that we found it written on something not a coin on the central plane. Again Nakhon Patong this year. So based on this one, you know, again I'm not 100% sure but I tend to think that there's a lot of evidence that's pointing towards Nakhon Patong being Tuwarawadi. So looking back at this one, the spatial extent, and again this is what the FAD proposes. I want to look at some other artifacts to think about here. Specifically the Dharma Chakra and the Sama Stone. Both of which are other types of artifacts which I'm looking at in my dissertation. Dharma Chakra, I'm sure you're all art historians in here. I don't have to explain this to you too much. It's the Wheel of the Law in Buddhism. It's representative of the first time in the Buddha and of the setting into motion of the teachings of the Dharma. So there's a lot of things going on in this map here. But the main thing I want you to see is that Tuwarawadi-style Dharma Chakras are found kind of scattered around the lower central plane as well as in the Kondratasima right at the corner of the plateau. We've also reportedly there was one found in Galasin in the center of the Karat Plateau. I can't confirm that. There's an entire language archeological report from about the early 80s I want to say that mentions a Dharma Chakra being found. But it's a mention based on hearsay of villagers and I haven't seen a photo of it. I don't know where it is today and as far as I know I don't know anyone else who's seen it and so it's more like a report of hearsay from villagers. So it's possible that we don't know. In Surat Tani we have a fragment of a broken Dharma Chakra. Now the hearsay of the Dharma Chakra on the Karat Plateau and the fragment of the one down here is evidence for some people that they say, oh well then the Karat Plateau in southern Thailand they were part of Tuwarawadi and I think that's kind of getting ahead of ourselves. I think that one piece is not indicative that it was part of the same cultural sphere. Clearly they were in contact. It's possible that it was seen as a gift or it was purchased. I mean we don't know and that's something that would need to be discussed but if we wanted to say that the southern reason was related to the central plane because of the Dharma Chakra I would say we would need to have more than one. The same applies for the Karat Plateau. So clearly these areas were in contact but I think that the isolation of the Dharma Chakra relatively to the central plane tends to indicate that Tuwarawadi cultural sphere was probably for the most part on the central plane. If we look at same stones from Pali Sema these were Buddhist boundary markers used around the outside of the ordination hall and on the Karat Plateau these are found in large numbers. Many of them have like depictions of different Buddhist motifs. Some of them are inscribed and for those of you who don't know Stephen Murphy graduating here in 2010 he did his PhD dissertation on Sema stones on the Karat Plateau a lot of sites all over the Karat Plateau had these Sema stones as well as wanted at Panongkulan. There are two sites on Panongkulan mountain which I don't think indicates a spread from Panongkulan. I think that the culture there there were some monks from the Karat Plateau that came down and established temples at Panongkulan but none have been found on the central plane. And so while some people say oh the central plane and the Karat Plateau were part of a single cohesive cultural group I think the fact that the Dharma Chakra is being isolated at the central plane and the same stones being isolated relatively to the Karat Plateau tends to indicate that these weren't a consolidated cultural sphere. These were two different cultures is what I think at the moment. Something else that people use to justify the Karat Plateau being part of the central plane is the mon language inscriptions because of course later there were Khmer language inscriptions on the Karat Plateau but early on we see these mon language inscriptions and people say oh mon language up there mon language down here that's one group and Khmer down here that's another group. But we need to back up a minute because on the central plane we find inscriptions written in mon and inscriptions in Bali. I don't want to say bilingual inscriptions because most inscriptions in Southeast Asia when we say bilingual many of us the first thing we think is written in one language and then the same message translated those are found in Southeast Asia but they're very rare. Usually bilingual means like a short text in Bali and then an unrelated text in a local language maybe like the invocation or something in Bali or Sanskrit followed by the actual message. On the central plane we find inscriptions written in mon in Bali or in mon with Bali. In what's now Cambodia we find Khmer and Sanskrit. On the Karat Plateau we find mon in Sanskrit not mon in Bali. And so again if we want to say that the Karat Plateau is the same cultural sphere as the central plane then we would have to explain away why they were writing in Sanskrit and not in Bali. Okay so again I don't tend to think that the Karat Plateau is the same cultural sphere as the central plane. So a few things to explain as I conclude so I want to re-summarize my views on Tuoravadi at the point. I want to share some of my ideas of what maybe the root causes for the debates about Tuoravadi and also want to challenge these views about old mon being the vernacular in the region. So again I think that Tuoravadi was a specific site. I think it was perhaps in the Kompatom. It seems convincing at this point. I think we can speak of a Tuoravadi culture which is not necessarily the culture of Tuoravadi going out but other places which had a similar and related culture to them. Similar religious and social practices similar material culture which I think was isolated primarily to the lower central plane. We can also speak of Tuoravadi art but this is what people in the past tend to view as having some similarities to Tuoravadi. This one I'm a little bit more skeptical of because I think a lot of the Tuoravadi art if we look at it closely we can actually break it up into smaller subdivisions. So I don't think it's not necessarily a cohesive group. Now for the cause of the debates about Tuoravadi one of the main reasons that we have this debate is because we have almost no epigraphic records of other place names from the region from the 1st millennium. So we have a lot of archaeological sites but we don't have place names. And if we compare that for example in Cambodia in Cambodia inscriptions we have a lot of place names. So we know this one is Ishanapura Yasut Harapura. We know the names of sites so we can kind of like fill in the map the dots on the map so we can write the names out for them. For ancient Thailand we can't do that we have almost no place names so then and the place names we do have it's not easy to pin them down to a precise size like for example Tuoravadi. We don't necessarily know which size was so I think what happens is since we don't have many place names is the few place names we have they tend to get absorbed and be used as the art styles or the kingdoms or the empires and then they get projected to a wider region. You know where for example we had more place names. Okay. If we knew the names of many urban centers I think people wouldn't assume that Tuoravadi is as large as people think it is. Instead if we knew the place name over here and this was Tuoravadi we would say well Tuoravadi went to here and then that was their space. You know it would be more subdivided based on the other names that we had to fill in the map and also if we had other place names instead of seeing all these little slight similarities and saying oh they're all similarly Tuoravadi art we would look at the differences and say oh this is Tuoravadi art that's Lovari art this is whatever art I think that it would be this case. But since we don't have such place names scholars in the past would tend to look at similarities and group things together and then use the only appellation that they knew which was Tuoravadi. So basically I think a major part of the debate is the fact that we don't have any place names and so people just don't know how to refer to these things in the past. Now this is something that I've really come on and I want to say that I didn't come to the way my current position I didn't come to easily and my biggest opponent was myself because my M8 thesis was Old Mon inscriptions and I was totally absorbed and I had all these grand ideas about what it meant and the more I studied about Old Mon inscriptions I'll say this when I started my M8 thesis we knew of 36 inscribed artifacts in Old Mon and by the end of my thesis I knew over 100 and so for me my own worldview of what Old Mon was it exploded. I found them in further geographic spaces and in larger numbers and so you know it just grows and grows and grows but then one day I sat back and I really thought about the length of them and the content of the message and I think that there's a problem with the way that people took Mon and applied that to Tuoravadi and almost used them interchangeably. You know they had a direct connection and any work you read about Tuoravadi for example DuPont in I want to say 1949 he published the name of the title of his text the book he wrote in like 1949 basically the Mon Art of Tuoravadi or something like that he makes a direct connection and all these other scholars too as I showed you early on LeMay, Sedes, all of them side and fat and even in modern all the modern work from the 80s and 90s and even more recently when people speak about Tuoravadi they speak about Mon interchangeably and some people like Piri Akairiq he talks about Mon Art and so they just switch it out when they don't want to say Tuoravadi anymore for example in the Karapata or Northern Thailand they just take that out and they use Mon instead and I think this is a big problem because I think that these sorts of claims have gone forward without enough retroflection as to why we started using Mon and Tuoravadi interchangeably and I think the problem is that now what happens is anytime an inscription is found which is written in Mon people assume that that location was included in the cultural sphere of what they consider Tuoravadi and they also immediately conclude that Mon was the vernacular in that location and I think both of these are suppositions which we shouldn't jump to lightly and when some people jump to them and then what happens is it gets sided and resided and resided until all the literature says it and no one actually stops and looks at why did we start calling it that I think what happens is a little short inscription gets found one line or two lines and then people say the population is ethnically Mon old Mon was the vernacular and the location is tied to other Tuoravadi locations which makes sense for everyone who's not studying the inscriptions they're just basing it on the evidence of an inscription being found but I think that people forget to stop and look back at that location how many inscriptions were found written in old Mon how large were those inscriptions how much text how many words were found in them you know how much evidence do we actually know that people in that location were using that language and what extent does that provide towards the local vernacular I think that a short text is not indicative of a vernacular if we look at Cambodia for example again we find lots of inscriptions, long inscriptions written in Khmer for the Mon's we don't you know we find these little like one votive tablet written like that is that indicative of the society actually no that's only indicative of the person who made the object so if we find one little Mon inscription all we know is there's one person and actually that one person may not have been a native Mon user you know when I give evidence of it like when I give presentations in Thailand I point out I wrote my M8 thesis in Thai well 10 years from now 100 years now someone goes to the library and says oh here's a book written by Thai it must have been a Thai person that's not the case anyone can learn a language and especially if it's only one line you don't even have to be fluent to write one line and so such a short short text cannot indicate for the whole society and it can't even necessarily indicate for the person who made that object so there's a few scenarios that we can imagine you know when we find old Mon text in a site we can say okay everyone there spoke Mon or we could say that maybe the ruling class spoke Mon and everyone else wasn't maybe they were a different group or maybe it was a diversity of group which is what I tend to think even in recent times as far as 100 years ago in Thailand they were like over 100 different languages languages and dialects you know and I'm sure a thousand years ago it would have been as many or more you know we had a high multitude it was a especially Thailand when we look at mainland Southeast Asia it was a crossroads of people coming from different directions and passing through there would have been a lot of languages minority languages majority languages but it's hard to say for sure and I think that it's possible that in some of these sites maybe on the central plain Mon may have been the vernacular at least of the ruling class but then for example on the carapato maybe not you know maybe it was only in a classic in a ecclesiastic language but not a spoken vernacular so this is just sometimes and I try to think of variations and I think for example of the monastic literati so we know in the past that most people probably couldn't read couldn't read and write except for the monks the monks can read and write but in a classic language is not a vernacular language we know from all over these regions we find inscriptions in Pali and Sanskrit but we do not assume that the local population spoke these languages because we say oh these languages are from a foreign land but we say oh Mon is from here also must be people who are here speaking Mon in this case it's easy to imagine because all of these old Mon inscriptions we find they're all religious they're all about merit making they're all about Buddhism these were made by monks in a religious context a literate monk doesn't represent the whole society and even then as is the case now monks move around for study purposes and so I can imagine a scenario for example let's say hypothetically the central plain people did speak Mon but the carapato they didn't and you had to go to the center up here and a local ruler said okay I'm going to make merit making a description for me so you could have had a monk from the center plain that spoke Mon and a populist that didn't or even you could have had monks from the northeast that came down to the central plain and learned a little Mon and then they went back and they might not even have been fluent in the language because again the text we find are very short okay so my point is that there's no evidence of other written languages before it came out of course in ancient Thailand and first millennium we don't have any evidence of other written languages so people tend to use that as the reason to say okay the population was Mon but I don't think this is nearly is necessarily justifiable because we can't take the lack of something to give us the conclusion for something else so in closing I'm not saying that Mon was or wasn't the ancient vernacular okay so the way I've been moving this it almost sounds like I'm saying it wasn't the vernacular and that's not what I'm saying it may have been maybe okay the Mon's if we want to talk about ethnolinguistic or racial groups or something they may have been the majority in some or many of these sites but my point is I don't think any of things are necessarily the case but when you look at the literature they're all is like de facto like obvious you know it's just repeated without being questioned and so what I'm arguing is that there isn't a lack of evidence to support the commonly repeated claims about ancient ethnicity and language usage which leads to further confusion and controversy again part of this being because the early period of the studies of Tuwarawati and Mon began during the late colonial period and the way we think about race and ethnicity and all these things the states and societies it's changed and so we have to have a little bit of you know reflection when we look at all of these old texts on the claims that were made what were those claims based what's the actual evidence we have to deal with and that was the you know that's the pill I had to swallow in my studies was after studying Mon I had to step back and say maybe it wasn't the language maybe it wasn't the vernacular or something like that but nevertheless it is indicative of a cultural connection across the region and I do think there is merit to continue sitting old Mon so with that I'll conclude thank you I assume you're taking questions yes of course thank you very much I have two questions for you one is can you walk us through the distinction which you seem to be adhering to between ethnicity on the one hand and language usage on the other which is really a question about how do you define ethnicity that's question number one and then question number two is a little bit more complicated so if you were to go to your example of or your hypothesis of this is not an indication of vernacular usage necessarily and we were to take the example not of Sanskrit in Valery but of Khmer used by non-conference speakers which is perhaps a more pertinent example in so far as Sanskrit and Valery are these in the cosmopolitan images of Periyava and so on Khmer is perhaps more on the order of one perhaps in terms of is it cosmopolitan or is it vernacular in this instance and so with Khmer we have a fairly clear reason why it would be used by non-conference non-ethnic Khmer whatever that means non-conference speakers because of hierarchies because of prestige etc. taking the place of Sanskrit in that way can it be, you didn't really use that as one of your possible modes of interpretation of non-usage you talked about sort of traveling forms and but does hierarchy play into it and if so how and why then you can begin to write your grand narrative about polity and first about ethnicity and language that is a very tricky question and that's not something that I've been focusing on specifically and I don't think that language is necessarily tied to ethnicity because of course ethnicity can be defined in a variety of terms like social practices or burial practices or food practices or a number of things and I think that language is not necessarily tied to that indicative of that but what we see in the literature is that distinction isn't made they see the old mon language and they identify that as ethnicity and the early colonial era scholars they went specifically to race they would say racial group this was the dominant racial group not even dominant they would you know and sometimes they would say it was a mon society and I don't agree with that I think that you know as you draw a distinction between ethnicity and language evidence of language that doesn't indicate for an ethnicity and even a language can spread between different groups of people as for example the English language there are lots of countries today which use the English language which aren't ethnically English and they you know don't have any use of the English but the languages can move and when the late colonial era period they didn't really see that the way we see it you know they thought that language moved with people you know I take for instance the Aryan invasion theory I always thought that if we have a language coming in it means you have a concrete word coming over and taking over and that view is kind of outdated you know because languages are living things that can move around and so I don't think it makes sense to identify language with ethnicity and I don't think presence of old mon languages indicates towards the ethnicity of or racial group or whatever of specific groups of people but I also think more over it doesn't necessarily indicate the language of which they were using and when you talk about mon and Khmer I think that mon certainly would have been a prestige language and of course there are a lot of things that I would have liked to talk about but I had to keep my presentation short and one of the things I didn't talk about is language mixing because on the Korat plateau we see a lot of Khmer borrow words in old mon inscriptions and even in the middle period we see some on the central plain written in old mon but it has an old Khmer word in there you know and so what we see is that of course around that same time Khmer influence is spreading in the central plain and to the Korat plateau primarily at the Mekong river and then across the Moon River valley and the tablets from Mahasarakam with the red ink writing they have like Khmer words, the word for Khmer is a Khmer word but all the other words around it are all mon words and so there is a matter of language mixing and in a way it's kind of unique because just like when we see inscriptions in a language which take Bali and Sanskrit and mix them in a way that we don't find in India, in India Bali inscriptions don't have Sanskrit and Sanskrit don't have Bali but in Southeast Asia some inscriptions they blur the line a little bit and they mix them, even the spelling sometimes they would take a spelling and we find a hybrid spelling which is an in Bali dictionary or is an in Sanskrit dictionary and so they have this merging of things which are foreign to their area and in the Korat plateau we see that, we see a mixing, we see several mon language inscriptions which have words or phrases borrowed from old Khmer and so definitely I think it was a prestige language that would also to me indicate could be evidence that the Korat plateau wasn't necessarily mon speakers if they're willingly pulling Khmer language in. Something else to think about is that any areas where we have Khmer going into that area they still have long text that had narrative text with lots of vocabulary and lots of things said whereas these mon inscriptions don't and so it's kind of hard to really answer it because what we have is a lack of evidence and part of that was for what they used the inscriptions for. The old Khmer inscriptions were used to record details, record what was donated to a temple in terms of manpower and resources and something like that. The mon inscriptions normally don't. They give us almost no detail. It's almost always just a personal name. They got merit. Sometimes they say what they got merit for but usually they don't and so we don't have much vocabulary, we don't have much narration, we don't have a lot of description and so it's not really indicative of language usage necessarily. We might have the word merit and a couple people's names and so by the structure we can identify this mon but they're not really showing us that they were using the language and so it's hard to say. I certainly do think that it would have been a language of prestige which also might have been why it was important and is an ecclesiastic language possibly. It's also important to think about all of the artifacts that we find inscribed are all artifacts which are related to religious practices which is kind of why throughout the examples of the monks is because clearly the old mon language, we don't see it in the context of rulers and talking about their societies and what they built or something. It's all about religion and so we don't know if the ordinary people were or weren't using it but I certainly think that any of these major languages in the past would have been a matter of prestige and borrowing and using them but it's kind of hard to say I think mostly because of the lack of evidence because there isn't much there are not many inscriptions and they don't say very much. Does that help a little? Anyone else Peter? I think you've made a strong case against diva dhabati, isn't it? Deeply proper limited evidence and I think you've made an interesting case about the dispersed evidence of the mon. What I think that's leading towards a void somewhat for me and yet what is there is the culture and then I suspect you're underplaying the fact that you've got very powerful, distinctive Buddhist culture, the dharma chakra wheels and the extension of that, that was Robert Brown's position wherever you got that, you had this culture, whatever it was, we don't know the history, we don't know the language, we don't really know much about it but it was that and certainly with Khmer influence and I think Piner Indorph indicated the first, dharma chakra was actually located in the delta and then you look at the scale of the buildings in Ceterre, a place like this, it's not only Nacombe-Badon, it's a broad area of mon sema also, of a culture expressing itself in religious monuments of considerable size organization funding, power, skill sets all of that, which are still there despite your sort of putting this into a void in terms of what the history of the place was, how it was tied up but there is something very substantial there which I suppose is better represented as mon culture with Pali and Sanskrit input and Khmer and to an extent it extends into Myanmar as well and possibly also to Kule so what are we doing with this this culture where we've got problems with the culture we don't have problems with the Buddhism, that's fairly consistent and the architecture and the art forms now the early Buddhist art forms are fairly common across a bigger area than what we've been showing on the maps but isn't there a culture there which maybe not a coherent culture which the scarcity of language tends to undermine I am not really decided on the case but I've thought about a lot of the things that you've mentioned, for example Browne study on Dharmachakras, Browne does tend to think that places where we find Dharmachakras are indicative of the same cultural sphere of Tuwarawadi but even Browne says that the Korat Plateau he says it's related but then he goes on to say that he doesn't think that it was culturally related to the central plane as far as Pina Indoor study of Dharmachakras I think her study has flawed for a couple reasons, for one thing she mentions evidence of Dharmachakras is simple but pretty cool and I've been there and looked at it and it's not Dharmachakras, it's just round objects and there's no evidence, there's no hub, there's no spokes, it's not clearly a wheel and if we look at Dharmachakras, there's three features they have to have there are the felli and the objects that simple break cook it's just round objects and if you look at other monuments from simple break cook we find other round things with motifs in the center which clearly aren't Dharmachakras Indoor also mentions it, it Ogeo and Korbure and I've been and looked at both of those, we also have evidence from Southern Thailand, Penangsa region at Yarrang and at Nakhonthi Tamarra, yes at Nakhonthi Tamarra there are chakras from Yarrang and Nakhonthi Tamarra but they're laterate, whereas all the ones on the central plain most people say they're sandstone Pasuk in Turawut said they're actually Arjulite which is a different type of stone which is only found at Dharmachakras on the Taurabadi, what we call the Taurabadi cultural sphere. Now Indoor mentions the ones from Ogeo and calls them Dharmachakra so if you look at them, they're not distinctively Dharmachakra, they're just wheels and chakra are not used only in the context of Buddhism the chakra is also associated with Vishnu and with Hinduism and we find other symbolism of chakras related to out of the Buddhist context and the Hindu context of Vishnu and like if you look at the one at Angkor Boray it's a very simple in appearance, it has spokes and it has a hub but it resembles nothing like the Dharmachakra of Taurabadi and so the first thing is it's not necessarily Dharmachakra is Buddhist but it could be a chakra in a Hindu context which make it separate from the Dharmachakra of Taurabadi secondly as the point that Brown made is that Taurabadi Dharmachakras they're stylized by the motifs and like the ones that Indoor mentions at Ogeo they share none of the similarities with the ones from the Taurabadi cultural sphere they have spokes but it's very simple they're just white and it has a rim and so it doesn't have like the decorative carvings and the flames around the outside or any of the distinctive features which Brown talks about of Taurabadi Dharmachakras the ones from Ogeo don't have any of those features except for the it looks like a wheel and so arguably it could be a wheel in a Hindu context but for other stuff I think that and again I'm not completely settled on this I just try to propose that we have made assumptions that have gone ahead of ourselves without necessarily looking at it now when we look at a lot of the context about the evidence we have for example C.Tep you mentioned some people think C.Tep was Taurabadi Piriya Krayeriksha argued that C.Tep was Taurabadi and that C.Tep was the center of the Taurabadi culture some people said Mung Seima was the center you know and so these were all important sites and again we don't really know which one was Taurabadi and we don't know which one was the hub but people tend to collectively pull them together without considering the splits or separations that there were in the styles and another thing that I've noticed is that whenever scholars look at these cultural areas they look at the statues, they look at the inscriptions, they look at the Dharmachakras and the votive tablets or the clay ceilings depending on what you want to call these are related to the religious culture which was not only religious culture they all would have been related to the elite culture and they don't tell us very much about common everyday people and I think this is a big problem in scholars that have looked at Taurabadi they don't for example look at pottery, they don't look at metallurgy like the prehistoric archeologists tend to look at things like pottery and metallurgy and the historic archeologists look at like statues and buildings and inscriptions and this is important for me because actually when I started I tended to have this idea that it was this cohesive thing until I started studying pottery and I started studying especially about Pimai blackware pottery is what really struck my attention because I was interested in the pottery from Bon Chiak which is old and if you read a lot of the early literature on Thai history in the past they tended to write off the Koran Plateau and said it was an underpopulated backwoods area until influence spread out from the central plain and from Cambodia and that's what a lot of people still think at least in Thailand and if you look for example at Bon Chiang pottery they were not, they were in advanced culture a long time ago on the Koran Plateau and then later like the early 1st millennium we have the Pimai blackware which is very technical, very nice pottery but it's a different cultural sphere than we're seeing in the Sakonakon basin you know and it's different from what we see Taurabadi pottery like all the pottery on the central plain there are a lot of similarities in sites that's not similarities that we see repeated on the Koran Plateau and so and again I'm not saying it is or isn't I'm saying that we have to look a little more broadly at other types of evidence we have to look at the beads we have to look at what are the metallurgy sites where's the stuff coming from what things were being traded and we have to look at the pottery and we have to consider all these things together instead of just looking at like the religious art alone and trying to think that that can be indicative of the whole society in the past and so again I'm not really arguing for one side or the other I'm just saying that if you look at the literature people kind of tended to jump the gun a little bit and jump to these conclusions without really looking at it as many things as we should be looking at I think and it's difficult you know I think again when you talk about Mung Sae Ma was a big one CTAP was a big one we don't have any names even we have the name we have Taurabadi we have Sri Chanasa some people think Mung Sae Ma was Sri Chanasa some people think Mung CTAP was Sri Chanasa and I think that if we had names for all of these sites which so far we don't but it would be nice if we found more we may begin to say oh these were more rivalling mandalas you know and there's also been a split in the past where people try to divide like the Buddhism versus Hinduism and they say like the lower Mekong was Hindu and like the western you know central planet island was Buddhism but if we look in the Mekong Delta we find plenty of Buddhist evidence if we look in the Taurabadi cultural sphere even in the Kumbh Tom we see plenty of Hindu evidence and so it's also a fallacy for us to try to make this Hindu-Buddhist divide because all of these societies had both Hinduism and Buddhism over playing if one or the other may have been more dominant in any given place at a time and so I just think we have to be reflective about the wider range of evidence and considering it's difficult you know because there's not a lot of material culture evidence that we have there hasn't been a lot of excavations and a lot of the excavations which have been done in the past they either weren't systematic or they weren't published properly and for example in Thailand there are quite a bit of controlled excavations which have been published but they've been published in Thai and this stuff has never been translated into English so it's only accessible to people who are literate in Thai and able to gain access to the archives yes ma'am? I'm just wondering, I don't need to talk about Thailand and the monk finding there but if you move over the border to Myanmar and it's not just a specific field like that but you have to look at some of the monk's descriptions and are they also similar? Are they all religious? Do they express the same things in Thailand or if they are different can we then think of there's a different relationship between the monk and the monk and their relationship with the general public? That's a good question. The monk inscriptions in Burma we can kind of split them into three groups, Baiglup, Baiggan and Tatoan and they're all dating kind of like later although there are some inscriptions in southern Burma that date as early as the 6th century like the Gokhun cave inscriptions probably about 6th century. This group looks very similar to the cave inscriptions in Saraburi which we date to the 6th century and the inscriptions at Baiggan we assumed that Baiggan was a Burmese-speaking majority but early on they were using Mon as an epigraphic language perhaps at the time they had not formalized written Burmese and so in the early period of Baiggan they were writing long narrative texts some really multi-stone text like one message would go from stone to stone to stone like this written in Old Mon which is actually interesting that the bulk majority of epigraphic evidence for Old Mon is actually in Myanmar and a lot of it by groups who weren't even you know speaking Mon as their main vernacular. In southern Myanmar we find more of course Baiggan period is a little later. Tatoan period there's stuff, some inscriptions which date to an earlier period one problem is that in Myanmar there's been less excavation and so a lot of stuff that may be there we don't know of it yet and some of it has probably been looted out and gone into markets or stuff like that so it hasn't really been properly documented but things get found even now continuously you know you'll see on Facebook or something where they're digging at a temple and they uncover a bunch of votive tablets or something like that so there actually is quite a bit of evidence for Old Mon in Myanmar. A lot of it that I've seen in tablets for example the content is quite similar to that we see in Old Mon inscriptions we found in Thailand the structure, the script, the language is quite similar some people debate this because we know that the Mon language was present on both sides of the Tanawsi range and so you know some people in the past have tried to say all that was to what it would be or there was something over here at the same time or maybe they started on this side and moved to that side and all these things we can't really say because there just hasn't been enough research done in southern Burma yet but that's certainly something that now that Myanmar begins to open up that's a topic that we need to look more into and so hopefully in the future we'll have more information on that Any other questions? The same as the stone culture and that's a lot about the view of the culture Yes ma'am I do think it's different cultural centres that there's this one major expression of the really chose material I think that the point I'm making is that many scholars in the past have tried to look at similarities for example in the statuary and tried to consolidate the central plan in the Korapa to as a single cohesive group and I'm not convinced of that and one of the reasons I don't think that is because of the water we don't Dharma Chakras we don't find them dispersed across the Korapa to and the same stones we don't find them dispersed across the center plane a point I didn't get to make here was that a lot of they not a lot a good number of the same stones on the Korapa to and they actually have Dharma Chakras on them and so the Dharma Chakra was an artistic motif it shows that there was connectivity and cultural sharing of ideas between the two regions but what we don't find is a lot of Dharma Chakras like Tuorawati style carved stones on the Korapa to and we don't find reportedly the very at the south the southwest corner we find several in Mung Se Ma area and then reportedly there was one from from Galicia in the center of the plateau but that's not confirmed and it's only one and so it's certainly indicative of connection but I don't think it's enough evidence to necessarily say that it was a single society or anything like that anyone else there is no no other language apparent it's on your questioning whether that was the liturgical language or a widely used language throughout this huge space but there's no sign of any other minor ones perhaps in communities in mountainous areas but not on the plain in mountainous areas I don't know of any inscriptions anyways the inscriptions were being produced by the lowland populations and we don't find any other regional languages any other local southeast Asian languages aside from on until the summer appears so no only mon and again but some people take that as indicative of a vernacular and of a consolidated society and I don't necessarily disagree with that but I don't think that it's an assumption we can make immediately based on the evidence the main reason being because most of these inscriptions are so short and so I don't think it's necessarily possible to make assumptions about the society based on such short messages and such scattered out like many of these locations there may be only one or two and so the point that I'm making is that although they may have been mon speakers there that alone shouldn't be evidence for all of us to just immediately accept that they were mon or that it was a mon society or that they were mon vernacular the problem I have again I'm not saying they weren't I'm just saying that I think we get ahead of ourselves by assuming that they weren't based on the limited amount of evidence that we have I'm just wondering if so the work that Peter's still into doing recently distinguishing between compositional how like and the surgical how for example if that correlates at all to the ways that you're attempting to look at this I'm thinking in particular about the compositional category which in some ways you're suggesting that compositional conveys or reflects vernacular usage certainly not the case with Sanskrit or ancient Cambrian it's compositional probably it's not compositional in ancient Cambrian it's neither of them reflect vernacular usage they look like very different relationships to the language so if you're still looking at the use of probably that includes the astical use still no matter what kind of electrical large umbrella one dimension or one mode is compositional and whatever this is is a surgical or situational handle none of that reflects vernacular usage does that map in some ways on how you're thinking about well and the way it could reflect on my idea is that it's possible for us to then look at areas where we find old Khmer language and say were those areas Khmer people or Khmer populations and was Khmer the vernacular in those places but I like to turn to the Khmer example more to draw attention to the lack that we find in old mom texts of course I think there's a fallacy in looking at the Khmer world I think that a lot of the literature tends to talk about sites as being Khmer populations or Khmer centers and when we read things like that I think that there's a tendency to overlook or to forget about minority populations and minority languages which most certainly would have been present and Khmer records mentioned that there were some other minority groups living on Khmer in the early period so it certainly wasn't like a consolidated single linguistic group there would have been minority groups even if the Khmer expanded their power influence the places they went to it wouldn't have been everyone in society speaking Khmer and then of course the religious class the ascetics of the monks or whatever like that so I think we can actually turn that and look back to Khmer and ask the same question any other questions? there's a lot of unanswered questions so thank you Hector for your presentation today I think for everybody to join us and we're going to help you guys on 20th November so next week we don't have but next month thank you