IAMS Beno Rothenberg Memorial Lecture 2025
Thomas Oliver Pryce (French Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS) will give the IAMS Professor Beno Rothenberg Memorial Lecture 2025 at the UCL Institute of Archaeology on 19 March.
IAMS Beno Rothenberg Memorial Lecture 2025
19 Mar 2025, 18:00 – 19:30
The Hunt for Ancient Metalworkers and the Prehistory of the sub-Himalayan Silk Road
Abstract
On the occasion of the British Museum conference, “Metals and mines: studies in archaeometallurgy”, in honour of Paul Craddock’s retirement in 2005, Vincent C. Pigott and Roberto Ciarla laid out a detailed argument “looking north” for the Chinese derivation of early Southeast Asian metal technologies. While the general idea of a Chinese origin for copper-base metallurgy was already widely accepted, usually on the basis of ‘trade and exchange’ relations, Pigott and Ciarla constructed an evidential trail, largely-based on the typology of metal objects and metallurgical paraphernalia, for a mid-late 2nd millennium BC routing via Lingnan, or southeastern China. Such was regional thinking as the present author was completing his PhD at University College London, which was added to by Joyce White and Elizabeth Hamilton with their late 3rd/early 2nd millennium BC proposal for a technological transmission via southwest China. This latter path more closely follows historical Southwest Silk Roads but reliable datasets on both sides of the border were greatly lacking.
Two decades later and the quantity and quality of data have massively increased, permitting more nuanced interpretations of long-term relations between Southeast and East Asia. Here I review recent Southeast Asian radiocarbon data, particularly from Myanmar, and compare them to the latest dates from southern China; demonstrating a chronological contiguity that does not require any interpretative acrobatics. This will be followed by laying out 17 years of research by the Southeast Asian Lead Isotope Project, which has constructed complex links of copper supply and demand, which spread across the region from the late 2nd millennium. Recent community detection analysis has exposed numerous sequential metallurgical transmission paths ‘looking north’ to southern Chinese origins. With the ever-growing Chinese dataset, we can now examine some of those putative exchange relations and interrogate what they might actually mean in terms of human interactions.
The lecture will be followed by a Reception in the Leventis Gallery of the Institute of Archaeology (ground floor).
Event recording
For those unable to attend in person, this event will be recorded on Zoom, please register for the Zoom link here.
Follow us
X (Twitter) | |
| Bluesky |
Soundcloud | |
YouTube |
Watch again
IAMS Beno Rothenberg Memorial Lecture 2024: Gold and power… to the people. The archaeometallurgy of collective action
IAMS Beno Rothenberg Memorial Lecture 2023: A millennium of Iron Production at the Royal City of Meroe, Sudan: New insights and future directions
Thomas Oliver Pryce
Senior Researcher
CNRS
T.O. Pryce is a Senior Researcher for the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He trained at University College London (BSc 2001) and the University of Sheffield (MSc 2004) before his PhD on early Thai copper metallurgy at UCL (PhD 2009). Dr Pryce undertook a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2009-2012) and a Senior Postdoc with the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (2013) before joining the CNRS that year.
He has been Director of the broad-spectrum Mission Archéologique Française au Myanmar since 2012, and of the BROGLASEA/SEALIP metal provenance programmes since 2008. Pryce has published 49 journal articles and 20 book chapters on his work on linking Southeast, South and East Asian populations of the 3rd millennium BC onwards.
In 2019 Pryce won the Research Prize of the Shanghai Archaeology Forum, and in 2023 he received his Habilitation de Diriger la Recherche from the University of Paris-Saclay.
Further information
Ticketing
Ticketed and Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes
Organiser
Carlotta Farci (On behalf of the Institute for Archaeo-Metallurgical Studies)