Category: Asia

The Vijayanagara Metropolitan Survey: Volume 1

Carla M. Sinopoli, Kathleen D. Morrison

M 41

Vijayanagara, the “City of Victory,” was the capital of South India’s largest and most successful pre-colonial empire from c. AD 1330-1565. This richly illustrated volume reports on the results of a ten-year systematic regional archaeological survey in the hinterland or “metropolitan region” of this vast and well-preserved urban site.

Primitive Polluters: Semang Impact on the Malaysian Tropical Rain Forest Ecosystem

A. Terry Rambo

AP 76

In the 1970s, A. Terry Rambo conducted fieldwork in Peninsular Malaysia with a group of Semang people. The community he studied had a seminomadic lifestyle: at times they stayed in houses or lean-tos in a village, and at other times they foraged in the surrounding rain forest for food. Rambo’s goal was to assess this group’s impact on the local environment.

Paleoethnobotany of the Kameda Peninsula Jomon

Gary W. Crawford

AP 73

In this volume, author Gary W. Crawford presents archaeological data he gathered on plant utilization by Jomon populations in southwestern Hokkaido. Using this data, he examines the adaptations of the Initial through Middle Jomon (a period from 8000 BP to 4000 BP). He also considers the success of the Jomon adaptation in northeastern Japan in general.

The Demography of the Semai Senoi

Alan G. Fix

AP 62

During 1968 and 1969, Alan G. Fix conducted an anthropological and genetic study among the Semai Senoi of Malaysia. His goal was to measure the amount of genetic exchange between local populations and document the effects of that exchange. This work combines results from that study with data from a 1965 census of aborigines and an expanded analysis.

The Yomut Turkmen: A Study of Social Organization among a Central Asian Turkic-Speaking Population

William Irons

AP 58

The Yomut Turkmen of Central Asia are a nomadic people who migrate seasonally with their flocks. They live in the region where northern Iran, Afghanistan, and southern Turkmenistan meet, east of the Caspian Sea. In this monograph, William Irons describes the Yomut Turkmen’s political structure, kinship system, and social organization.

The Williams Collection of Far Eastern Ceramics: Tonnancour Section

Kamer Aga-Oglu

SP 2

Kamer Aga-Oglu was curator of the Museum’s Asian collections from 1945 to 1974. An extraordinary scholar, Aga-Oglu singlehandedly transformed the study of Asian ceramics, focusing particularly on understudied Asian trade wares in the Museum’s collections. A specialist in Far Eastern art history, she devoted her life’s work to researching the division’s outstanding collection of Asian ceramics. Throughout her entire tenure at the Museum, Kamer Aga-Oglu was the Museum’s only woman curator. Her catalogs of the Williams Collection contain dozens of photographs and detailed descriptions of the pieces.

Faction and Conversion in a Plural Society: Religious Alignments in the Hindu Kush

Robert Leroy Canfield

AP 50

In this work, anthropologist Robert Leroy Canfield discusses several powerful social systems in central Afghanistan and their impact on the geographical distribution of religious sects in the area. Territorial groups, the kinship network, and community fission all play a part in why people live where they do. Canfield did his fieldwork among the residents of the province of Bamian during the years 1966 to 1968.

The Williams Collection of Far Eastern Ceramics: Chinese, Siamese, and Annamese Ceramic Ware Selected from the Collection of Justice and Mrs. G. Mennen Williams in the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology

Kamer Aga-Oglu

SP 1

Kamer Aga-Oglu was curator of the Museum’s Asian collections from 1945 to 1974. An extraordinary scholar, Aga-Oglu singlehandedly transformed the study of Asian ceramics, focusing particularly on understudied Asian trade wares in the Museum’s collections. She described for the first time a whole new range of East Asian ceramics that until then were unknown, even among specialists, and she documented the pre-European movement of these ceramics throughout the Pacific and as far as Turkey and East Africa. Her catalogs of the Williams Collection contain dozens of photographs and detailed descriptions of the pieces.