Buddhist Archaeology and the Silk Roads
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Main Building
- Room
- Djam Lecture Theatre (DLT)
- Event type
- Lecture
About this event
The Central Asian expeditions led by Hungarian-British archaeologist and explorer Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) from the Punjab into present-day Gansu Province and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region resulted in the collecting of tens of thousands of artifacts.
These manuscripts, textiles, paintings, prints, and sculptures – principally divided between the National Museum of India, the British Museum, and the British Library – are instrumental for our understanding of Buddhism during the medieval era and their acquisition is inscribed today within frameworks of collecting and plunder. In my paper, I examine instead the impact of colonial archaeology, particularly as practiced on the Indian subcontinent, upon Stein, and I trace the institutional networks within which he travelled. In this manner, we can not only draw parallels between Buddhist archaeology on the Indian subcontinent and Buddhist archaeology along the silk roads, but also understand the place of Buddhist material culture from the silk roads in mapping ideas concerning cultural contact, the Indo-European homeland, and more.
Attending the event
This event is free and open to all.
Sponsor and organiser
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Lecture Series in Chinese Buddhism is kindly sponsored by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. It has been organised by the SOAS Centre of Buddhist Studies.
About the speaker
Michelle C. Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Georgetown University. Her research addresses the medieval Buddhist and silk road art of northwestern China, and the history of colonial era silk road archaeology. Her first monograph, Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (Brill, 2018), examines mandalas of the 8th-10th centuries at Buddhist cave shrines in Dunhuang. She recently co-edited Beyond the Silk and Book Roads: Rethinking Networks of Exchange and Material Culture (Brill, 2024). Her current book project examines the expeditions of Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) and their intersections with British colonial institutions and discourses on craft, ethnography, and climate change.
Image credit: International Dunhuang Project.
