Newsletter

Speakers representing the EFEO will include:

• Gregory Kourilsky, “About Jean-Yves Claeys’s documentary film on his ‘Archaeological Mission to Siam’ (1929)”
• Christophe Pottier, “Sharing archaeology: the online publication of the Angkor Conservation Department’s archives”

The EFEO Center in Chiang Mai is hosting Catherine Scheer in residence from July 20 to August 7.

Raquel Selosse and Sumet Ponjorn are participating in the international conference “French Studies for a Sustainable Future,” organized on July 31 by the Faculty of Humanities at Chiang Mai University. Their presentation, “When French Library Science Meets Thailand: Cataloging Practices and Challenges,” introduces the collections of the EFEO Center in Chiang Mai’s library and discusses the challenges of adapting French library science methods to the Thai context, particularly with regard to cataloging Thai-language resources in the SUDOC, BULAC, and WinIBW systems.

On 12 July, Arlo Griffiths and Véronique Degroot will visit the National Museum of Indonesia (Museum Nasional Indonesia) to continue documenting artefacts as part of the EFEO’s collaboration with the Indonesian Heritage Agency.

Véronique Degroot and Hedwi Prihatmoko will travel to Bali during the second half of July to visit archaeological sites, notably in Bangli (Pura Puncak Penulisan) and Gianyar (Goa Gajah, Goa Garba, Gunung Kawi, Pura Penataran Sasih).

The centre’s director, Arlo Griffiths, will be away on summer holiday from 16 July to 24 August.

Mikel Billoud has been a visiting scholar at the Kyoto Centre since 14 June 2026, conducting research on “Le Negoro-ji, bastion du bouddhisme japonais du XVe au XVIIe siècle. Un complexe religieux influent dans un monde en transition”. He is the recipient of a grant from the Pierre-Ledoux Jeunesse Internationale Foundation, which each year helps the EFEO to fund fieldwork stays for young researchers.

On 2 July, Coline Lefrancq (CNRS, UMR 7041, Paris-Nanterre) left the Centre to continue her field research in Odisha and West Bengal as part of the ERC Synergy DHARMA project. During her stay in Pondicherry, she undertook, alongside Ramesh M., an archaeological mission in the Chidambaram region, focusing on the study of megalithic burial sites, bead-making workshops and archaeological excavations. Her research programme focuses on trade networks and cultural interactions in South Asia through the study of archaeological sites and collections of ancient ceramics.

On 3 July, Yūto Shiba (Hiroshima University) concluded his stay at the Centre as a Visiting Scholar. His research focused on the acquisition and transmission of the Sanskrit intellectual tradition, with a particular interest in late classical Indian poetics. During his stay, he took part in the Centre’s Sanskrit and Tamil reading groups to further his doctoral research, whilst benefiting from academic exchanges with researchers at the EFEO and immersing himself in the living traditions of Sanskrit scholarship in India.

S.A.S. Sarma took part in two academic events. Firstly, he presented an online paper entitled “Promissory Practices in Ritual Traditions: With Special Reference to Bharaṇippāṭṭu” during the working seminar of the ERC VOICES project, Promising Voices – Voices of Promise: Towards a Cultural Economy of Performative Genres, organised by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków from 9 to 11 July. He then spoke at the conference “Water: Across Archaeology, Literature and Ritual”, organised by the Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP) on 15 and 16 July, delivering a paper entitled “The Ritual Consecration of Water-bodies in Śaiva Traditions”.

S. Saravanan will present a paper entitled “A Survey of Comparative Dravidian Studies before Caldwell” at the national seminar “Studies on Dravidian Languages before Caldwell”, organised by the Robert Caldwell Chair in collaboration with the Department of Linguistics at the Tamil University of Thanjavur, on 23 and 24 July.

From 1 August, the Centre will welcome Jean-Luc Chevillard as a Visiting Scholar. During a series of research visits scheduled between August 2026 and July 2027, he will continue work on a project entitled “Towards an Inventory of Tivakaram and Pingalam”, which focuses on comparing the texts of the Tivakaram and the Pingalam using as many palm-leaf manuscripts as possible. His visit will contribute to the Centre’s research into Tamil lexicographical traditions and will be carried out in close collaboration with the activities of the MIRA project.

From 29 June to 4 July, Sister Chamreunsithy is staying at the Centre to work with Éric Bourdonneau on her thesis, which examines epigraphic practice in 10th-century Angkorian Cambodia.

From 1 July until October, the Centre is hosting Nicolas Revire, an art historian, associate researcher at the EFEO and recipient of a Centre for Khmer Studies (CKS) fellowship, to continue his provenance research on Khmer art collections.

Michela Bussotti is taking part in the ESHS/HSS (European Society for the History of Science/History of Science Society Joint Meeting) conference, which is being held in Edinburgh from 13 to 16 July. She will be giving a presentation on 14 July as part of the panel “Graphics and Text: 20 Years Later, Symposium in Honour of Francesca Bray”.

On 23 July, Michela Bussotti will take part in the panel “Scientific Dreams and Technical Limits: The Structure of 字 Beyond Language”, as part of the 26th conference of the EACS (European Association for Chinese Studies), which is taking place in Venice from 21 to 25 July, organised by Ca’ Foscari University.

On 6 July, as part of the Hong Kong campus of the École des Arts Joailliers held in Seoul, Élisabeth Chabanol, together with Arnaud Bertrand, the School’s Head of International Research, will give a lecture entitled “Silla Kingdom and the Eurasian Steppe: Gold, Power, and Funerary Landscapes”.

Véronique Degroot is travelling to Palembang and Kayu Agung to collect clay samples from the lower reaches of the Musi River during the first week of July.

Dominic Goodall is giving a presentation entitled “Pious Deeds related to Water Management recorded in Cambodian Inscriptions up to the 12th Century” at the symposium Water: Across Archaeology, Literature and Ritual, organised at the Institut français de Pondichéry (IFP) on 15 and 16 July.

Christine Hawixbrock will be visiting the EFEO Centre in Vientiane from 26 August to 11 October to study the archaeological material unearthed at Vat Sang’O 5 and Vat Sang’O 3 (Vat Phu region, Champassak province) during the excavation campaigns carried out by the French Archaeological Mission in Southern Laos (MAFSL), which she heads. Chloé Chollet (EPHE-PSL/CASE) will join her to take part in this work from 3 to 21 September.

Michel Lorrillard will be visiting the Thai universities of Khon Kaen and Maha Sarakham from 20 to 24 July to discuss matters with academic staff and carry out documentary research there.

Christophe Marquet will be visiting the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum in Yokohama on 3 and 4 July to study the collection of preparatory drawings by the painter Utagawa Hiroshige III (1842–1894), in connection with the production of printed designs for fans in the early Meiji period.

On 1 and 2 July, Frank Muyard will take part in and chair sessions at the 2026 Annual Congress of the Taiwan Archaeological Society, held at the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum in Chiayi.

On 6 July, Frank Muyard served on the examination board for Hsieh Chung-Pin’s Master’s thesis, entitled “Nationalisation and Sinicisation of the Past: A History of Archaeologies in Post-War Taiwan, 1945–1981”, at the Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University.

Martin Nogueira Ramos is on a research trip to Japan until 5 July. He is consulting documents on Catholicism in Kyoto during the Meiji era at the National Diet Library (Tokyo), the Kirishitan Bunko (Sophia University, Tokyo) and the Kyoto Institute, Library and Archives; at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of Tokyo, he is also consulting documents from the early 17th century relating to the religious policy of the Ōmura clan.

From 20 July to 7 August, Catherine Scheer is in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as part of the ANR AltLife-SSEA project, to meet colleagues from the Regional Centre for Social Sciences and Sustainable Development and to begin field research in the region with the Research and Training Centre for Religio-Cultural Community.

From 8 to 31 August, Catherine Scheer will return to Cambodia, to Mondulkiri province, to monitor the project mapping forest cemeteries, investigate the collective memory and photographic records of the civil war years, and carry out some verification work as part of her research project on rituals.

From 5 to 10 July, Saarthak Singh is taking part in the 27th Congress of the European Association for South Asian Archaeology and Art (EASAA) at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He will deliver two papers, entitled “Two mosques of the Delhi Sultanate in central India” and, with Maniyarasan R. (Trichy), “Towards a multidisciplinary method for the conjectural reconstruction of ruined monuments in central India”.

Saarthak Singh will be on a field trip to India from 15 July to study monuments and inscriptions in the Chanderi region of Madhya Pradesh.

David Bazin is in Paris from 3 to 7 August to work with Vladyslav Sydorov and Adam Wijker on the management, mapping and visualisation of survey data at the EFEO’s geomatics laboratory.

The team at the Vat Phou Museum is continuing its work on cataloguing and restoring artefacts from the storerooms and the museum. Bertrand Porte will be on site during August to supervise this work.

Olga Nowicka and M. V. Muralikrishnan are taking part in the international conference ‘Revisiting the World of Bhāsa: From Manuscript to Theatre’, which is being held from 5 to 7 August at the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library, University of Kerala, Trivandrum. They are presenting the following papers:

• O. Nowicka: “Surveying Private Manuscript Collections of Kerala: The Kiṭaṅṅūr Cākyār Family Collection and the Discovery of Preserved Manuscripts of Bhāsa’s Plays and their Ancillary Staging Manuals”
• M. V. Muralikrishnan: “Preserving the Dramatic Legacy of Bhāsa: A Preliminary Study of Manuscripts in Kerala Kalamandalam”.

The KARMA project (Khmer / Angkor: a physical and digital repository on copper metallurgy) will begin on 1 July 2026 and will run for five months.

This project is jointly led by the EFEO (Brice Vincent, Jean-Sébastien Gros, Sébastien Clouet) and the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France / C2RMF (David Bourgarit, Ruven Pillay, Marianne Segaud), and is financially supported by DIM PAMIR, the C2RMF and the Sosoro Museum (Cambodia).

It aims to organise a corpus of samples – and the associated digital data – documenting the full range of production processes involved in copper production in ancient and modern Cambodia (from the first millennium BCE to the early 20th century) into two distinct and interoperable repositories:

the physical repository KARMA-φ, currently comprising over 1,200 samples (metal shavings, metallographic sections of objects and slag, fragments of clay cores, etc.), housed at the C2RMF within the COREF sample library;
the KARMA-num digital repository, comprising over 1,000 inventory numbers (bronze statues and objects, mining and metallurgical equipment), built from the C2RMF’s EROS database and made available as open access.

The MIRA project (Manipravalam — Insight, Research, and Analysis), led by Suganya Anandakichenin (University of Hamburg), officially began on 1 June 2026, before being launched at the EFEO Centre in Pondicherry on 1 July 2026. Funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant (No. 101229483), it is based at the University of Hamburg in partnership with the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO).

By combining philological research and digital humanities, this project explores Manipravalam, a hybrid literary language blending Sanskrit and Tamil, which had a profound impact on intellectual life in medieval South India.

One of its main objectives is to establish a sustainable digital infrastructure comprising an open-access database of Manipravalam texts, a searchable corpus, lexicographical tools, images of manuscripts, and a specialised interface for inputting Grantha script.

Scheduled to run until 2031, the project is based at the EFEO Centre in Pondicherry, which serves as its main research base in India.

The MIRA project is holding its launch workshop, entitled “MIRA Kick-off Workshop: (Re)thinking Manipravalam”, on 13 and 14 August.

Designed as a forum for collective reflection, this event will bring together specialists to discuss their experiences of working with texts in Manipravalam and to consider future directions for this field of research. Discussions will focus in particular on the very concept of Manipravalam, its significance for the study of Tamil literary, religious and intellectual traditions, as well as on the limitations of existing grammars, dictionaries and other reference tools. The aim will also be to identify the resources and tools that need to be developed to advance research. The workshop thus aims to lay the intellectual foundations for the MIRA project and to foster collaboration within this emerging field.

The event will also provide an opportunity to launch the book Words Can Mean Anything: A Lexicographic Volume in Honour of Jean-Luc Chevillard, in the presence of the honouree.

Following the call for applications for the post of IT specialist / web and database developer, Devadath V.V. will be joining the EFEO Centre in Pondicherry from 1 July. An engineer specialising in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with over six years’ experience in natural language processing (NLP), linguistic technologies and large language models (LLMs), he has notably worked on projects relating to Indian languages, OCR and digital linguistic resources. Within the MIRA project, he will be responsible for developing the digital infrastructure, comprising the website, the database, the searchable corpus and the associated tools, and will work closely with the team’s researchers.

K. Satish Kumar and D. Murugesan also joined the project as technicians on 1 July. They are responsible for digitising printed editions and manuscripts of interest, as well as for the optical character recognition (OCR) of texts in Manipravalam, their correction and preparation for inclusion in the digital resources.

S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma, Senior Researcher, and R. Sathyanarayanan, a research fellow at the EFEO, will be joining the project on a part-time basis. They will contribute to the project’s academic activities, including the critical edition, translation and study of texts in Manipravalam, as well as to group reading and research sessions.

As part of the VOICES project — “Voices from the Deep South: the Rise of Pāṭṭu Song Cultures of South Asia”, led by Cezary Galewicz (Jagiellonian University) and funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the ERC Advanced Grant programme (grant no. 101201303), S. A. S. Sarma has launched a weekly reading group focusing on passages dealing with music in the Brahmayāmalamātṛpratiṣṭhātantra.

The sessions, led by S. A. S. Sarma, are based on a transcription of manuscript T. 522 held at the French Institute in Pondicherry. He has also compiled the source text and related documentation, which are now available on the project’s Data Hub platform.

The group meets every Tuesday at 4.00 pm (India time) and is open to all interested researchers.

Volumes 180 to 199 of the PEFEO/EFEO Monographs are now available in digital format on the Persée platform. The entire collection (201 titles) will gradually become available for viewing and downloading, free of charge. The Sequens collection (3 titles) will soon join the first volumes of the Monographies that are already available. From now on, volumes from both collections will be made available on Persée three years after their publication in print.

All EFEO publications are available on the publications website.

Éric Bourdonneau and Lucie Cez, “The Sedimentary Archives of Ancient Purandarapura. A new perspective on the geometric hydraulic network in the western plain of Angkor”, Preah Nokor – Journal of Khmer Studies, Numero 6, 2025, pages 1-33.

The recipient of the “David Ruegg” postdoctoral fellowship, dedicated to Buddhist studies, is Hélène de Brux. Her project is entitled “Une exploration des sources d’Aśvaghoṣa : La séquence de conversions du Buddhacarita 21.2-35”.

The recipient of the non-specialised postdoctoral fellowship is Wanda Zinger. Her project is entitled “Identités biologiques et sociales des communautés maritimes en mers de Chine et de Java : Giồng Cá Vồ (Vietnam) et Batujaya (Java) (500 BCE- 500 CE)”.

– Solène Ferreira is based at the Pondicherry centre for a study on “Aux seuils des saisons : la place des rituels agraires pour traverser les changements en Himalaya indien”

– Hai Binh Nguyen is based at the Ho Chi Minh City centre for a study on “The transformation of traditional salt making in Sa Huynh (Quang Ngai): A Study on the impact of natural and social environments”

– Thuix Chazal is based at the Ho Chi Minh City centre for a study on “Un siècle chez les Xoơteă de Dak Ha. Ethnographie et Ethnohistoire d’un village autochtone des hautes terres du Vietnam central”

– Eléa Herbin is based at the Tokyo centre for a study on “La rationalité bureaucratique de la violence : enquête sur les archives des instances délibératives et décisionnelles de la captivité en Mandchourie (1932-1945)”

– Thi Minh Tran is based at the Hanoi centre for a study on “Human skeletal variation of Vietnamese populations through time from foraging to farming: An evolutionary perspective on health and disease”

– Peng Wang is based at the Hong Kong centre pour une étude intitulée “Notion et usage de la transformation (hua) de soi dans la sotériologie taoïste. Étude sur les deux Livres des transformations et leur canonisation”.

On 6 July, Katia Juhel, Director of Libraries, is in Madrid to take part in the recruitment process for the new Head of Libraries at the Casa de Velázquez.

Katia Juhel, Head of Libraries, and Sovannara Mey, archivist, are attending part of the programme for the “CollEx-Persée” Summer School: “Fonds, corpora, materials: heterogeneous archives and collections in higher education and research”, taking place from 6 to 10 July.

On 22 July, Raquel Selosse, Head of the Chiang Mai Library, took part in the “Internship Sharing Event” organised by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Chiang Mai University. She gave a presentation on the library, its collections and internship opportunities to third-year library and information science students.

The EFEO library in Paris is open throughout the summer, except on public holidays and on the morning of 7 July (when it opens at 1 pm).

Opening hours are adjusted between 27 July and 7 August: the library is open from 9 am to 5 pm.

The switch to a new version of the library catalogue, Koha, is scheduled for the end of August. As soon as the date is confirmed, it will be announced via the usual channels (website, social media).

There should be no disruption to the service, but it may take a little time for both staff and readers to get used to the new interfaces.

Consult the catalogues and digital tools :
– Catalogue of books and periodicals
– Catalogue of Archives and Manuscripts
– Digital heritage library

Check the EFEO’s Facebook page and Bluesky account regularly for any updates on the terms and conditions of the public reception service.

The last 145 photographs from the Raymond Eches Collection are now available on the photo library’s website.

A press release from the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts announces the return by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York of an important piece from its collection of Khmer art: a unique statue depicting Hiraṇyakaśipu, originating from the Prasat Chen temple. The decision to return the artefact follows identification work carried out by Éric Bourdonneau at the Koh Ker site.