ABSTRACT
Gold artefacts from Southeast Asia serve as powerful agents of historic narratives, art market mechanisms, and illicit trade. Reassessing them from provenance research and their collection history provides insights into the ways in which different key agents such as digger, dealer, collector, museums, and scholars shaped the taste and market.
This chapter aims to highlight why and how transformations, contestations, or exclusions of knowledge take place. This focus explains stages of (re)appropriation. By using multiple sources such as archive material, press clipping, and fieldwork, this chapter builds the knowledge production of gold items upon archaeological, archival, and curatorial scholarship. The local context is brought in by highlighting the digging out of archaeological finds on the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Knowledge engagements produced in the Ethnological Museum of Berlin address lost items and provenance research on four collectors of Javanese gold.
