Sunday 11 November 2012

IDP 8th- 10th November 2012: Hakan Wahlquist (1)

I 've just returned from some very exciting days at the International Conference
"Archeology of the Southern Taklamakan: Hedin and Stein's Legacy and New Explorations, organized by the IDP (International DunHuang Project) at the British Library in London.

I met a very enthusiastic group of people from professors and scholars to students and "private scholars" (also called layman, I'm talking about myself) but most of all I met a very interesting group of beautiful and lovely people with a special place in their heart for the Tarim Basin.

The program started on Thursday evening (8/11) and lasted till late in the afternoon on Saturday (10/11).

What I will do (in any case try to do) in the next few weeks  is that I will look back on this program, show you the paper(s) they presented and find some documents on the internet in order to show you who they are and what they do.

Today I will start with Hakan Wahlquist.



IDP 8th- 10th November 2012: Hakan Wahlquist (1)

Hakan Wahlquist works for the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm and is a gifted speaker.
Hakan presented in total two papers:


Sven Hedin and Huang Wenbi: The Sino-Swedish Expeditions and their Legacy
This paper will give the background to Hedin’s archaeological discoveries and their contents, what influenced them and what influence they
in turn exerted. It will then turn to the first
collaborative archaeological excavations, the Sino-Swedish Expeditions from 1930 and consider their aftermath, especially the research conducted by the Chinese archaeologist Huang Wenbi. Huang was a member of the expedition and conducted research under its auspices, but on the whole, for political reasons, kept apart from it. He continued related field archaeology in Xinjiang after 1935 right into the 1950s, and continued to keep
some contact with Hedin. The lecture will bring us into the present day, thus covering the whole chronological scope of the conference, by introducing the exploratory Sino-Swedish trip to the area between Keriya and Endere in 1994, including showing a short video. 

and:


Folke Bergman and the Discovery of Xiaohe
Folke Bergman was one of the members of the Sino-Swedish Expe- ditions. During his work in the Lop Desert he was led to an ancient burial site by a local hunter. This was the site later known as Xiaohe but, despite his documentation, the site was not rediscovered for another seven decades when Bergman’s work was translated into Chinese. This paper will present the story of this discovery and Bergman’s work and documentation. 



To show you who Hakan Wahlquist is and why I think he is a gifted speaker, please listen to the following video which came quite recently on the internet:




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