From 5 – 14 January 2024, the CO-OP cohort met in Thailand for the first of its three critical thinking labs. After a night in Bangkok, we set out for Northeast Thailand where we would remain for the next 8 days. After two days of discussion and debate at a hotel in Khao Yai, we spent the next 6 days visiting archaeological sites, temples, and museums in the region. Key locales included Plai Bat II, from where the “Prakhon Chai hoard” was looted, the Khmer temple complex of Phanom Rung, where the Phra Narai lintel was repatriated from the US in 1988, Muang Sema and Muang Fa Daed, two important moated sites dating from the Dvaravati period, and the mountain top temple of Wat Phu Khao Phutthanimit.
For most of the cohort, it was their first encounter with the Northeast. Others among us, had been to sites such as Phimai and Phanom Rung before, but not for many years. For myself, however, these were places that I have visited frequently over the past two decades as part of my PhD research and my subsequent book Buddhist Landscapes: Art and Archaeology of the Khorat Plateau, 7th to 11th Centuries. Much of this I did alone, or if I was lucky, from time to time in the company of one or two Thai archaeologist colleagues. I carried out this research very much through an archaeological, and to a lesser extent, art historical lens, prioritizing this type of data collecting and interpretation over all else.
Upon arriving at these sites again with the CO-OP cohort, my default mode kicked in (fig. 1). I approached and explained them very much from an archaeological point of view. However, over the course of the trip it became apparent that others in the group viewed and interacted with the locales we were visiting in a variety of different ways. Some were drawn to the contemporary religious practices occurring at the sites, others focused more on concepts of heritage making, or the involvement of state actors, such as the Fine Department of Thailand. This challenged my way of understanding these sites, but also began to make me attentive to different ways of viewing and interacting with them.
In fact, at many of the locales I visited over my two decades of fieldwork in Northeast Thailand, I was aware that these sites could also be understood on other registers – be they religious, social, political, economic, or as we have conceptualized it in CO-OP, as forms of local epistemology. However, I often felt ill-equipped to engage with these aspects and they remained, by and large, on the periphery of my understanding. The discipline of archaeology had provided me with ample tools to record, document and analyze the material and visual culture I encountered, but left me lacking in many other ways. I struggled to find frameworks within which to fully understand the multi-layered meanings associated with many sites.
The experience of visiting these locales with the CO-OP cohort provided an opportunity to see these sites anew. This brought home to me the value of bringing together an interdisciplinary team from both the Southeast Asian region and beyond. The discussions and collegial questioning and critique of each other’s positions, views, approaches, and interpretations were both challenging and rewarding. I found the visit to Wat Phu Khao Phutthanimit particularly fruitful (figs 2 -3). The site is abuzz with religious activity, patronage, expressions of local heritage and means of display. When I first visited in 2007, I could not fully grasp many of these aspects of the site. Experiencing it with the cohort in 2024 provided a chance for me reconcile ways in which to engage with the site’s archaeological remains and with its equally important expressions of local heritage, museology, and Buddhist praxis.
Reflecting on the experience of the first Critical Thinking Lab has also made me ponder restitution and repatriation debates more generally. We all approach them through the lens of our disciplines, be they archaeology, art history, heritage studies, and/or our professions – curators, provenance researchers, academics, lawyers, government officials, etc. But these issues, like the locales we visited, are also multifaceted and multilayered in nature. They too require us to guard against falling too quickly into our default modes and behoove us to remain sensitive to the local epistemologies, concerns and aspirations of the source communities that underpin much of what we do.