The 4th International Conference on Documenting and Researching Gravesites in Pacific Asia (DRGPA 2019) has grown out of the successful conferences on Documenting and Researching Gravesites in Taiwan, DRGT 2011, 2015, and 2017. In 2019, we expanded the focus of the workshop beyond Taiwan and Penghu, northwards to Japan and Korea, and south and eastwards from the South China coasts, over Southeast Asia to the Indian subcontinent. To fit this Indo-Pacific expanse, DRGT was renamed to DRGPA .

We invite you to join us to participate in person or online in our next conference, DRGPA 2021.

The Pacific Asian region’s history is one that is marked by migration, trade, colonization, and the spread of religions. These phenomena placed burial and religious practices, epigraphy and architecture, cultural and linguistic functions and meanings into a dense semiotic network that allows for their meaningful comparison through time and space. For DRGT and DRGPA, the comparison of different regions or beliefs thus had always assumed a central position among the research methods presented in this series of conferences. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and limited travel has put limits on research for two years and has made traveling and fieldwork difficult or impossible. Therefore, for DRGPA 2021, we continue to expand the inclusiveness of our conference while keeping in mind that current events have produced field sites which are much more local to the researcher. With this in mind, the theme for our next conference focuses more closely on the local relations of burial and religious practices to their social and geographic context, thus focusing on the meaning and function of practices in their local context. Merging regional with religious, linguistic, and historical studies, our 2021 conference thus attempts to explore the relevance of heritage sites for their communities and how studies in this field can enhance our understanding of these sites, their communities, and their relation to local landscapes.

In this three-day conference, we intend to present a number of invited talks, regular peer-reviewed papers, field research reports, an academic writing workshop for graduate students, and a digital humanities workshop for field research technologies. Presentations of all workshops are going to be jointly published in the DRGPA 2021 proceedings.