Reconstruction of the late first millennium AD harbor site of Sembiran and analysis of its tradeware

Abstract

The site of Sembiran on the northern coast of Bali was an important trading harbor with demonstrated intensive links to the Indian subcontinent, the Western Indian Ocean, and Mainland Southeast Asia between the second century BC and the second century AD. Using a combination of excavation and geophysical survey, we have newly mapped a dense network of subsurface structures, which we interpret to be foundations for harbor infrastructure dated to the eighth to ninth centuries AD that were subsequently covered by shoreline aggradation. An assemblage of eighth to twelfth centuries AD Chinese tradeware in dated contexts from our excavations of these shoreline structures and additional trenches further inland suggests a renewal in trade activities at Sembiran, coinciding with the growth of Chinese maritime trade in Island Southeast Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical archeology
• trans-Asiatic trade networks
• sub-surface electrical resistivity tomography
• Tang Chinese tradeware
• Bali

Acknowledgements

We also thank Mike Carson for his preliminary geoarchaeological survey at Sembiran, and Campbell Macknight and Peter Lape for their comments on the tradeware.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research discussed in this paper has not been published elsewhere and is not being submitted simultaneously for publication elsewhere.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Australian National University (ANU), as Ambra Calo’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, #DE120100069) excavations project (2012-2015) entitled “The Archaeology of the North Coast of Bali: a Strategic Crossroads for Early Trans-Asiatic Exchange.” Ian Moffat is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (#DE160100703) and a Commonwealth Rutherford Fellowship from the Commonwealth Scholarships Commission. We thank Homerton College for hosting Ian as a Research Associate during the writing of this manuscript. Research was conducted in collaboration with the Indonesian National Institute of Archeology (ARKENAS), the Institute of Archeology Denpasar (BALAR), and Udayana University in Bali.