a series of photographs of Borobudur and Prambanan (Scheurleer 1991;
Theuns de Boer 2002).
Following the opening of the National Museum, an archaeological society
was set up in Jakarta in 1885. Its chairman, the railway engineer Jan Willem
Ijzerman (1851–1932), would undertake new excavations in both Borobudur
(where a deeper layer with more sculptured panels was found, a report of
which was published in 1887) and Prambanan (Tanudirjo 1995: 62–3). Hindu
inscriptions were copied and studied by philologists such as Hendrik Kern
(1833–1917, the Professor of Sanskrit at Leiden) and the tea plantation owner
Karel Frederik Holle (1829–96) (ibid. 64). They concluded that there were
obvious links with India, a connection that seemed to corroborate the results
obtained by the comparative analysis of monuments.
Competition between empires, a motor of imperial mobilization (some
examples of which have been described earlier in the book), also had an
impact on the archaeology of Southeast Asia. Indonesian antiquities received
international acclaim in the International Colonial Exhibition held in Paris in
1900 (Sibeud 2001: 189–90). As happened in the case of French Indochina,
and also as a consequence of the competition felt as a result of the opening of
a French School in Hanoi (see below), this exhibition put pressure on the
Dutch state to control the study and preservation of antiquities. Urged by
scholars such as Groeneveldt, Hendrik Kern, as well as the anthropologist
Lindor Serrurier (1846–1901) and Gerret Pieter RouVaer (1860–1928), in
1901 a Commissie voor oudheidkundig onderzoek op Java en Madoera
(Commission of The Netherlands Indies for Archaeological Research in Java
and Madura) was created under the direction of Jan L. A. Brandes (1857–
1905), a Hindu-Javanese specialist. As in the case of the French School in
Hanoi, the commission was mainly formed by philologists and historians. It
accordingly focused on epigraphy, as well as Hindu and Islamic archaeology.
Prehistory was not included within its remit until the 1920s. The commission
created its own means of communicating its mainWndings through annual
reports (Miksic & Solheim 2001: 685), and a series of exchanges with French
colleagues took place (Cle ́mentin-Ojha & Manguin 2001: 54–6). Although
Brandes’ death in 1905 has been seen as marking the start of a period of
decline, in fact the inventory of antiquities continued, and a restoration of
Borobudur was undertaken between 1907 and 1911 by a Dutch second
lieutenant and engineer, Theodoor van Erp (1874–1958) (Miksic & Solheim
2001: 685). Probably connected to the restoration’s success, the commission
was promoted, in 1913, to an Oudheidkundigen Dienst (Antiquities Service),
with Krom as director (Tanudirjo 1995: 66).
Archaeology in Indonesia, as seen in this section, had all the ingredients of
colonial archaeology. To start with, it was directed by scholars from the
South and South East Asia 221