A time capsule of rediscovered scholarly research on Thailand and its environs.

The 1969 creation of a field research station near Lampang in northern Thailand by the newly established Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies was something of a gamble. The Vietnam War was spreading into Laos and Cambodia and a communist insurgency was growing in Thailand, and some scholars feared being compromised by Cold War schemes and maneuvers. Yet in the five years of the station’s existence, many Nordic scholars undertook research based at Lampang, often in partnership with Thai and other foreign colleagues. They produced significant work, including archaeological excavations that rewrote the prehistory of mainland Southeast Asia and a mapping of the folklore and languages of upland minorities that helped decipher the linguistic history of the region’s lowland majority peoples. Following the station’s closure in 1974, an assessment of the project was made and combined with an extensive collection of papers based on research carried out there. The resulting volume had a limited circulation, a situation remedied by the publication of this revised and updated edition.
 
In a critical introduction, this new volume considers the research station in its time—a period of war and cultural and political turmoil, when the academic world was being transformed by an influx of baby boomer students just before the advent of mass travel. This revised and updated edition of a once-lost collection of scholarly research offers insights into the massive changes sweeping higher education today.

Søren Egerod (1923–95) was a distinguished Danish linguist and sinologist who played a key role in the development of Nordic Asia scholarship in the modern era. Per Sørensen (1932–2015) was a pioneer in Southeast Asian archaeology who was director of the Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Lampang field research station over the five years of its existence.