Research Article Currents of currency: utilising die studies to trace Rising Sun/Srivatsa coin distribution in first-millennium AD Southeast Asia Andrew Harris 1 , Rafael Cabral 1 , Maria De Iorio 1,2 , Pipad Krajaejun 3 & Chong Guan Kwa 4 1 Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore 2 Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore 3 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand 4 S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Author for correspondence: Andrew Harris ✉ harris72@nus.edu.sg First minted by polities in north-central Myanmar as early as the fourth century AD, silver coins bearing Rising Sun and Srivatsa motifs have been found in numerous archaeological contexts across Southeast Asia from Vietnam to Bangladesh. Strong stand- ardisation in the design of these coins highlights patterns of trade and cultural interaction across this region that are otherwise underexplored. Here, the authors draw on a dataset of 245 coins from museums in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar, identifying die links that support trade routes between widely disparate areas, and illuminating the utility of die studies in counteracting the illicit trafficking of antiquities. Keywords: Southeast Asia, first millennium AD, numismatics, ancient trade, coinage, antiques trafficking Introduction The numismatic history of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly during the first millennium AD, often remains peripheral in discussions of evolving regional trade and economy (Gutman 1978; Wicks 1985, 1992a & b; Onwimol 2018). This is despite increasing historical and archaeological evidence for early Southeast Asian polities as key nodes in Received: 2 December 2024; Revised: 9 January 2025; Accepted: 28 January 2025 © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is used to distribute the re-used or adapted article and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use Antiquity 2025 Vol. 99 (406): 1030–1048 https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.77 1030