The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

REVIEW ARTICLES 297
28. THE CHINESE WORD-GAME
The year 1974 seems to have been a lively one in the historiography
of Sri Vijaya. By the middle of the year the first two parts of this
paper had been published, and after that, when I went to Java, a paper
on the same subject was presented to the International History Congress
held at Jogyakarta. The scholars present were extremely kind and they
did not throw me out of the window. By the end of the year one Dr.
Harun er Rashid, a scholar who was not present at the Jogya congress,
accepted in writing that Cbaiya in South Siam was Sri Vijaya. His paper
is "Ancient Association between Bengal and Thailand", published in the
Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Vol. XIX, No. 3, December
1974.
Meanwhile in the same year the University of Pennsylvania Museum,
under Dr. Bennet Bronson, excavated sites in South and Central Sumatra in
cooperation with the Archaeological Service of the Republic of Indonesia.
I was told by Americans in Bangkok and Indonesians in Java that the
results were most disappointing. In fact tbe expeditions were complete
failures. I have not seen any of the reports, which is a pity because I
myself have never been to any part of Sumatra, so what I write now
could contain a greater percentage of nonsense than it normally would.
A pity, I repeat, because I would like to end this paper on a serious note.
However Bronson allowed Professor O.W. Wolters to read a
preliminary report on the Palembang excavations in South Sumatra, and
Wolters wrote a paper that is under present discussion. Wolters
mentions two short accounts, "A Lost Kingdom Mislaid: A Short Report
on the Search for Sri Vijaya" by Bronson, and "Archaeology in Sumatra
1974" by Jan Wisseman; and he calls Bronson's unpublished report
"Archaeological Research in Sumatra 1974". As tbis title is a little
misleading I should explain that it refers only to the, first or South
Sumatra excavation, and not to the Central Sumatra dig carried out
later in the same year (1974). Wolter's own paper is titled "Landfall
on the Palembang Coast in Medieval Times," published in Indonesia, a
series produced by Cornell (No. 20, October 1975.) My remarks that
follow are based on the meagre material that Wolters used from
Bronson's preliminary report.