Exploring the East-West Cultural Corridor: Historic and Modern Archaeology of Bago and Dawei, Myanmar

The East-West Corridor is a conceptual tool for identifying common cultural processes across mainland Southeast (Ishii 2009). Our research group has drawn upon this model to study the past histories of sites and their continuities with present traditions. My role in our group has been adding Myanmar to our database of Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos and widening our discussion of the East-West Cultural Corridor concept. Our ‘sites’ vary in size, at times end-points, and at others, connectors along routes that over many centuries haveconnected Myanmar to capitals such as Sukhothai (13–14th), Ayutthaya (14–18th) and Angkor (9–15th) (Shibayama 2013).1 The‘routes’ include walls, moats, streams, paths and special purpose roads used by man, ox-carts and elephants to move within, between,and beyond sites (Im Sokrithy 1998, 101; Surat Lertlum and Im Sokrithy 2013)