The Archaeology Of Mainland Southeast Asia

This important new synthesis focuses on the social world of early mainland Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia was the scene of one of the world's major civilisations, that of Angkor, until it was sacked in the early fifteenth century. The origins of Angkor were barely known until recent archaeological excavation and field research began to reveal the region's dynamic development and to raise new questions to serve in its understanding. This important new synthesis focuses on the social world of early mainland Southeast Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos and adjacent areas. The book begins when the area was occupied 12,000 years ago by hunters and gatherers. The author stresses the importance of sedentism and domestication. These encouraged the spread of coastal communities into the interior valleys. Particular relevance is seen in the exchange of valuables, including bronze, as symbols of status. The origins of civilisation, for long assumed to result from Indian expansion in the region, are seen as rooted in local changes, along with the selective adoption of Indian religious and political ideas within coastal cheifdoms. In bridging the gap between prehistory and history, this book will appeal not only to archaeologists but to those interested in the general history, culture and arts of Asia.

The archaeology of the early cultures of mainland Southeast Asia has been transformed in the ten years since Charles Higham published the first major summary of the period from 10000 BC to the fall of the Kingdom of Angkor. He has now written an entirely new book, which takes into account a host of new discoveries. The dynamic coastal hunter-gatherers at Khok Phanom Di provide a startling image quite at variance with our earlier understanding of this period. The origins of rice cultivation in the Yangzi Valley, linked with the distribution of the languages, provides a whole new view of the spread of farming communities. At last, the origins and dating of the Bronze Age are resolved, and the social life from mines to settlements, and on to the rituals of death, can be followed. New excavations at large Iron Age sites in Cambodia and Thailand now allow us to appreciate the vigour and dynamism of societies on the brink of the transition to the state. A fresh appraisal of the available inscriptions has opened new vistas on the origins and development of the great kingdom of Angkor. Professor Higham has integrated all these new findings into a fascinating account of Southeast Asia's past, bringing a freshness and vigour to the period which can only provide for a fuller understanding of how this vital region has developed over the millennia into its present form.

For the first time, the complete cultural history of mainland Southeast Asia is covered in one volume.

"The Civilization of Angkor is remarkable and unique in that it delves into the prehistoric roots of the civilization. Higham is THE international authority on southeast Asian archaeology, and presents an up-to-date and provocative synthesis of Angkor."--Brian Fagan, author of Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. "In blending archaeological and documentary data to chronicle the rise of this important Southeast Asian state, Higham's rich history of Angkor effectively refutes traditional models of state development in the Mekong region and offers insights regarding the nature of Angkor and the processes that led to its emergence."--Miriam Stark, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Hawai'i and editor of The Archaeology of Social Boundaries

Southeast Asia ranks among the most significant regions in the world for tracing the prehistory of human endeavor over a period in excess of two million years. It lies in the direct path of successive migrations from the African homeland that saw settlement by hominin populations such as Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. The first Anatomically Modern Humans, following a coastal route, reached the region at least 60,000 years ago to establish a hunter gatherer tradition that survives to this day in remote forests. From about 2000 BC, human settlement of Southeast Asia was deeply affected by successive innovations that took place to the north and west, such as rice and millet farming. A millennium later, knowledge of bronze casting penetrated along the same pathways. Copper mines were identified and exploited, and metals were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers. In the Mekong Delta and elsewhere, these developments led to early states of the region, which benefitted from an agricultural revolution involving permanent ploughed rice fields. These developments illuminate how the great early kingdoms of Angkor, Champa, and Funan came to be, a vital stage in understanding the roots of the present nation states of Southeast Asia. Assembling the most current research across a variety of disciplines--from anthropology and archaeology to history, art history, and linguistics--The Oxford Handbook of Early Southeast Asia will present an invaluable resource to experienced researchers and those approaching the topic for the first time.

This comprehensive and absorbing book traces the cultural history of Southeast Asia from prehistoric (especially Neolithic, Bronze-Iron age) times through to the major Hindu and Buddhist civilizations, to around AD 1300. Southeast Asia has recently attracted archaeological attention as the locus for the first recorded sea crossings; as the region of origin for the Austronesian population dispersal across the Pacific from Neolithic times; as an arena for the development of archaeologically-rich Neolithic, and metal using communities, especially in Thailand and Vietnam, and as the backdrop for several unique and strikingly monumental Indic civilizations, such as the Khmer civilization centred around Angkor. Southeast Asia is invaluable to anyone interested in the full history of the region.