| Abstract: |
Trade between Upper Myanmar, Northeast India and Southern China has long been an active source of cultural interchange. A number of ethnographic studies were compiled in the 19-20 century although more recent scholarship has been minimal. In an effort to fill th this gap, the author briefly joined a team of Nagaland, Japanese scholars carrying out a long-term assessment of archaeological and ethnographic carnelian use in Nagaland, during a survey visit to relevant prehistoric and early Buddhist sites in Myanmar in December 2015. This Introductory Note focuses on the Myanmar evidence, summarising carnelian usage in relationship to shifting patterns of interchange with Nagaland and other areas of South Asia and Yunnan. The summary concludes that within Myanmar localised extraction of small-scale deposits and trade may be the context within which carnelian bead use endured within Tibeto-Burman groups of Upper Myanmar in the first millennium CE transition from prehistoric to Buddhist eras and continues on a small scale today. However, more archaeological data is needed on the Myanmar side to explore links between ethnographic similarities in bead use in both countries and excavation of carnelian ornaments in mortuary contexts of the late first millennium BCE and the early centuries CE (Sarma and Hazarika, 2014
Pautreau et al., 2007).
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