Zwolle: WBooks; Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, 2012. 144 p., ill. ISBN 978-90-400-0360-8* From April 21 to November 4, the Municipal Museum of The Hague (Gemeentemuseum den Haag) held an exhibition "Gold of Java" with unique jewelry items of the capital island of Indonesia from its collections. To inform visitors, a peer-reviewed catalog was published, authored by Pauline Lunsingh Scherlser, a major connoisseur of Southeast Asian art and former curator of the South and Southeast Asian collections of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The catalog consists of three parts: "Introduction to the era of Indo-Buddhist culture in Indonesia", "Java as an island of gold", "Objects from the Municipal Museum of The Hague". It is preceded by a foreword by museum Director Benno Tempel. Footnotes and references are provided at the end of the monograph. The text of the book is duplicated in Dutch and English in two columns. This makes it easier for non-Dutch-speaking readers to get acquainted with the catalog1. The first part opens with a short essay "Acquaintance with Javanese antiquities", which tells about the history of collecting ancient monuments by the Dutch, the activities of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences 2, the State Museum of Antiquities (Leiden)3, the Commission of Antiquities 4, the Archaeological Service 5 and the transfer of the Javanese collection from the State Museum of Antiquities to the State Museum of Ethnography (Leiden)6. P. L. Scherleer emphasizes the difficulties of establishing the place and time of discovery of ancient monuments, as well as establishing their dating, and identifies the main epochs of the Indo-Buddhist era in Java: proto-classical (200-750), Central Java, or early classical (750-930), and East Java, or late classical (930-1500) (p. 12) 7. The author describes the types of shrines and temples and "mountain abodes of the gods" in the Central and Eastern Javanese periods, unfortunately without diagrams, noting the creation of a new type of templ ... Read more