A review of archaeology in mainland Southeast Asia

This article outlines recent advances in establishing and understanding the prehistoric sequence in mainland Southeast Asia. Research has been unevenly distributed, varying from virtually none in Cambodia to a marked intensity in Hong Kong and the adjoining mainland. A new pattern is becoming apparent, due in no small part to the new findings in southern China. It is argued that despite its long history of occupation, beginning withHomo erectus almost a million years ago, tropical Southeast Asia was occupied by scattered inland groups and larger, possibly sedentary coastal foragers until exposed to intrusive agricultural societies during the third millennium BC. These communities, which originated ultimately in the Yangzi Valley, brought with them rice cultivation and were responsible for the wide distribution of Austroasiatic languages. The three divisions of this language superfamily are now distributed from eastern India to southern China. Following a relatively brief Neolithic period, small and autonomous communities, particularly in Lingnan and Bac Bo (Guangdong and Guangxi provinces of China and the area of the Red River Delta), were exposed to exchange contact with the Shang state of the Chinese Central Plains, and this brought exotic jades and bronzes. Within this context, a local bronze industry was established between 1500 and 1000 BC over much of Southeast Asia, but without any obvious social developments until the middle of the first millennium BC, when several major changes occurred. These incorporated iron smelting and forging and exposure in the southern parts of the region to Indian mercantile contact and along the northern margins to the expanding Chinese empire. Adaptations varied regionally, from the establishment of warrior chiefdoms to counter the Chinese to the construction of water control systems in the arid heart of Southeast Asia to alleviate environmental unpredictability. It is within these regional changes that we can identify trends toward the establishment of states, some of which persisted in an unbroken lineage to the present.