Theme and Sessions

Serving as a bridge for the field of archaeology, anthropology, history, and metallurgy, “the International Conference on the Beginnings of the Use of Metals and Alloys” intends to create a forum for scholars from different specialisations and backgrounds to present and share new research, insights, approaches, and results of archaeometallurgical investigations. The goal of the conference is to provide an opportunity for the academic discussion as well as the exchange of thoughts and dialogues concerning the inception, adoption, expansion, and impact of metals on ancient Asian societies, as well as interactions among people influenced by metals. This conference is also hoped to emphasise and strengthen the collaboration, interdisciplinary approach, and activities of archaeometallurgy among researchers who share the same interest in Asian archaeometallurgy.

This year theme is set to “diversity and connection of metallurgy across Asia and beyond”. This is to reflect Southeast Asia being a host of the BUMA conference for the first time. The region, in recent years, has seen significant progress on archaeometallurgical research since it commenced in the mid-1960s. Situated at the end of the Eurasian transmission route, Southeast Asian metallurgy is intimately connected to those developed in neighbouring Eurasian populations. This certainly demonstrates a long history of connection and transmission of metallurgical knowledge as well as people across Eurasia and beyond. An issue of metallurgy environmental impact, being one of major human-environmental interactions in the past that posed short and long term consequences to our planet, will also welcome. This theme provides the scholars a great opportunity to further explore and interrogate how rich, complex, and diverse the ancient metallurgy and its environmental and socio-cultural processes, interactions, and impacts involved were throughout the vast region.

This “diversity and connection” is hoped to be demonstrated through contributions from archaeological expeditions, analytical results of finds, new approaches and new technologies in archaeometallurgical studies, new interpretations of legacy data, comparative studies, as well as experimental and ethnographic data drawn from various regions in Asia, covering from West Asia, the Middle-East, Central, North, South, East, Southeast Asia, and western Pacific region.

Bringing our archaeometallurgical communities together, this conference also extends our interest to explore our neighbouring continents: Europe, Africa, and the Americas that will introduce new insights into our understanding of past metallurgy and its environmental and socio-economic impact on a global scale and how these discoveries can be compared with our Asian knowledge.

Lastly, through these contributions, this conference hopes to convey, through this academic assembly, to Southeast Asian non-archaeometallurgist scholars the potential of metals-based research to address wider archaeological questions and encourage new generations of scholars to take part in this research.

These sessions are preliminarily proposed in hope of capturing the main theme as well as open a forum for other related topics. However, the participants are encouraged to propose new sessions or papers relevant to the main theme. The current sub-themes are as follows:

1. Connecting the dots: metallurgy, societies, connection, and diversity within Asian continent (archaeometallurgy of various Asian regions: from Near East to Indo-Pacific regions)

2. Beyond Asia: metallurgical connection and diversity on a global scale

3. Human and environmental impacts of metallurgy in past societies

4. New or advanced analytical techniques in archaeometallurgy