Awesome Archeology

Today (Friday) here in Saigon we visited the Museum of Southeast Asia, quite an extensive holding of displays, art and artifacts from the broad region that currently includes 11 nations. There were dusty but intriguing dioramas of this region during the early centuries and periods of war -- many wars (confirming my childhood perception of "Mongol hoards," right or wrong). Explanatory signs were good, and I began to get a feel for belief structures, such as Buddhism, geographical movement, and language groups (54 language groups have shaped Vietnam itself).

Here as in the Cham Museum in Hue, my appreciation for the folks who discover, gather, study, and display historical materials grew. I know that a vast network of individuals -- archeologists and hired (or enslaved) workers to say nothing of the museum-keepers -- is responsible for these treasures. I appreciate their work. I know that the question of ownership (linked often to the agency paying for the exploration) is a delicate one, such as with the Elgin marbles in the British Museum and here the Cham sculptures excavated by the French. That is a debate I cannot solve, of course, but again I want to say thank you for the adventurous curiosity, the scholarship, the sweat, and the determination of all those workers past and present who make the artifacts available to us.