SEAA News Blog

Dear Members of the Society for East Asian Archaeology,

On behalf of the entire executive board, I would like to welcome you to the new home of the SEAA online. After many years of excellent service, we decided it was time for an update and change to a new website where members can easily find and discuss the latest news, discoveries, publications, and jobs related to the archaeology of East Asia. Along with the change in format, I’ll be serving as the new Web Editor. My name is Andrew Womack and I’m currently a postdoctoral scholar in Chinese Archaeology at Stanford University. I’ll be managing the transition to the new site as well as the new SEAA blog. The new website contains a number of improvements and new features, including:

‘TephroArchaeology’ is a translation of the Japanese word kazanbai kōkogaku (lit. volcanic ash archaeology), referring to a sub-discipline of archaeology that has developed in Japan in the last few decades. The first book compilation using the term, edited by the doyen of tephroarchaeology, geologist ARAI Fusao, appeared in 1993; chapters were written by 5 geologists, 3 archaeologists, 3 geographers, an engineer, and a historian. From its beginning, this subdiscipline has been interdisciplinary in approach and applied to all time periods throughout the Japanese Islands.

The Xianbei from southeast Mongolia were the first foreign sovereignty over North China since the 4th century. During the 200 years of Xianbei rulership, the cultures of old and new inhabitants – the Han-Chinese, the Xianbei and diverse steppe peoples, the Sogdians and other Central Asians from the west – confronted and competed with one another.

Salary: £25,050 - £27,238
Location: National Museum Of Scotland, Chambers Street
Level: Collections Care/Conservation
Deadline: 26/03/2019
Hours: 37
Benefits: Membership of the civil service pension scheme
Job Type: Temporary

The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, seeks a full-time Assistant Curator in Japanese art. This grant-funded, four-year term, entry-level position is designed to offer optimum training opportunities for a curatorial career. Note: this is NOT a Federal position.

The UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Sweden invites applications for a

Post-doctoral Fellowship (2 years full-time) in Heritage Futures

L’intérêt des collectionneurs pour les monnaies naît en Chine au VIe siècle de notre ère, soit près d’un millénaire avant le premier traité sur la numismatique en Occident. Il se maintient malgré le déclin et l’alternance des différentes dynasties impériales. Au milieu du XVIIIe siècle, l’empereur Qianlong possède la collection la plus complète comprenant toutes les monnaies émises en Asie orientale depuis le VIIe siècle avant notre ère, soit sur près de deux mille cinq cents ans.Mais les monnaies sont aussi soigneusement collectionnées et décrites par des lettrés, « amis des monnaies ».

The Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS) ( https://archaeology.cornell.edu/ ) invites applications for a two-year Hirsch Postdoctoral Associate in Archaeology position, starting in Fall 2019. We invite applications from scholars who have completed the Ph.D. within the last three years with a specialization in archaeology (broadly defined).

Memory and Agency in Ancient China offers a novel perspective on China's material culture. The volume explores the complex 'life histories' of selected objects, whose trajectories as ginle objects ('biographies') and object types ('lineages') cut across both temporal and physical space. The essays, written by a team of international scholars, analyse the objects in an effort to understand how they were shaped by the constraints of their social, political and aesthetic contexts, just as they were also guided by individual preference and capricious memory. They also demonstrate how objects were capable of effecting change. Ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the present, and spatially from northern to southern mainland China and Taiwan, this book highlights the varied approaches that archaeologists and art historians use when attempting to reconstruct object trajectories. It also showcases the challenges they face, particularly with the unearthing of objects from archaeological contexts that, paradoxically, come to represent the earliest known point of their 'post-recovery lives'. (from the website of the publisher)

September 16–20, 2020

Further details will be published on our website ea-aaa.eu in spring 2019