Written as a travelogue, Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia tackles the most pressing issues of cultural-heritage management in an engaging and accessible way. In each chapter the author makes the past relevant to the present through his encounters with archaeological sites. While the book's anecdotes are associated primarily with Thailand and Indonesia--from a decaying National Museum in Manila, to the search for traces of the thousands of Communists who were killed after an attempted coup in Bali, to the discovery of a bottle of perfume found among the personal effects of Indonesian ex-president Sukarno--they have broad international interest because of the issues they raise. These archaeological stories, again and again, remind us what history both remembers and conceals.
They were the medieval ancestors of two U.S. Presidents, but were they the ruthless, land grabbing rogues history has painted them, or did they simply take up arms in defence of the Irish clans they had sworn to protect from the bloodthirsty hordes that surrounded them? The love story, cradled in their saga, so enthralled another U.S. President that he devoted many hours in composing a long poem entitled: 'The Conquest of Ireland'. This historical novel is a tale of betrayal and love, slaughter, mayhem, and deception and you, the reader, will find it hard to believe it is closely based on a true story! **************************************** The book contains many references to the Pagan culture which, despite the naysayers, existed in Ireland during that period; including the reason for wearing vizards on Hallowe'en, which is based on local homelore. It is also an attempt to regain ownership of a tradition which once was uniquely Irish. The Dia Mother, who is referred to in this novel, was accepted by the Celtic Church as the feminine face of god. Her worship has survived in Ireland to the present day through the veneration of Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ. Statues of whom can still be seen in grotto's in every town and city in Ireland. This novel is an honest attempt to shed light on a historical miscarriage of justice and restore some dignity to a slandered man. Denis Byrne, Ireland 2014
The claim that heritage practice in Asia is Eurocentric may be well-founded, but the view that local people in Asia need to be educated by heritage practitioners and governments to properly conserve their heritage distracts from the responsibility of educating oneself about the local-popular beliefs and practices which constitute the bedrock of most people’s engagement with the material past. Written by an archaeologist who has long had one foot in the field of heritage practice and another in the academic camp of archaeology and heritage studies, Counterheritage is at once a forthright critique of current heritage practice in the Asian arena and a contribution to this project of self-education. Popular religion in Asia – including popular Buddhism and Islam, folk Catholicism, and Chinese deity cults – has a constituency that accounts for a majority of Asia’s population, making its exclusion from heritage processes an issue of social justice, but more pragmatically it explains why many heritage conservation programs fail to gain local traction. This book describes how the tenets of popular religion affect building and renovation practices and describes how modernist attempts to suppress popular religion in Asia in the early and mid-twentieth century impacted religious ‘heritage.’ Author Denis Byrne argues that the campaign by archaeologists and heritage professionals against the private collecting and ‘looting’ of antiquities in Asia largely ignores the regimes of value which heritage discourse has helped erect and into which collectors and local diggers play. Focussing on the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan but also referencing China and other parts of Southeast Asia, richly detailed portraits are provided of the way people live with ‘old things’ and are affected by them. Narratives of the author’s fieldwork are woven into arguments built upon an extensive and penetrating reading of the historical and anthropological literature. The critical stance embodied in the title ‘counterheritage’ is balanced by the optimism of the book’s vision of a different practice of heritage, advocating a view of heritage objects as vibrant, agentic things enfolded in social practice rather than as inert and passive surfaces subject to conservation.
The Heritage Corridor argues for a transnational approach to investigating and recording heritage places that emerge from histories of migration. Addressing the material legacy of migration, this book also relates it to issues of contemporary importance. Presenting an image of the built environment of migration as one shaped by the ongoing flows of people, ideas, objects and money that circulate through migration corridors, Byrne proposes that houses and other structures built by migrants in their home villages in China over the period 1840–1940 should be seen as crystallisations of the labour, aspirations and longings enacted and experienced by their builders while overseas. Demonstrating that the material world of the migrant is distributed across transnational space, the book calls for an approach to the heritage of migration that is similarly expansive. It proposes and illustrates new methods and strategies for heritage practice. The Heritage Corridor is a book for scholars and students in the fields of critical heritage studies, migration studies and Chinese diasporic mobilities. It is designed to be accessible to heritage practitioners, readers with an interest in the material worlds of migration, past and present, and to all those with an interest in the ‘archaeology’ of transnational migration.
When the governor of the Central Bank and his young granddaughter are captured by an arch criminal and held for a huge ransom, Danny Dempsey is called upon for assistance in tracking down the gang and rescuing the hostages.
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