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Connecting prehistoric and historic cultures in Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2016

Ian C. Glover
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Extract

Linking the early historic cultures of Southeast Asia to their prehistoric antecedents has, despite some decades of research, proved difficult for a number of reasons. Until the 1960s, this did not seem to be an issue for scholars of the region. For George Coedès, the region was simply occupied by diverse and backward ethnic and linguistic communities, cultivators using stone tools, or at best, people using bronze with poorly developed social organisations until impacted by the expanding Han peoples during the third century CE: ‘There is very little direct information about the societies of South East Asia before they entered into contact with India and China.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , October 2016 , pp. 506 - 510
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2016 

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References

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6 There are several technical reasons for this, but primarily, extreme seasonal humidity fluctuations leads to the decay of quartz and felspar inclusion in ceramic material, leading to anomalous radon loss. For an ambitious attempt to date early buildings see Martini, Marco, Sibillia, Emanuela, Cucarzi, Mauro and Zolesi, Patrizia, ‘Absolute dating of the My Son monuments (G Group and E 7) with the thermoluminescence technique’, in Champa and the archaeology of My Son (Vietnam), ed. Hardy, Andrew, Cucarzi, Mauro and Zolesi, Patrizia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), pp. 369–80Google Scholar.

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18 Ibid., p. 219.

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21 Malleret, Louis, L'Archéologie du Delta du Mékong, 4 vols., I: L'Exploration Archéologique et les fouilles d'Oc-Eo; II: La civilization materielle d'Oc-Eo; III. La Culture de Founan; IV: Le Cisbassac (Paris: EFEO, 1959–63)Google Scholar.

22 Pierre-Yves Manguin, ‘The archaeology of the early maritime polities of Southeast Asia’, in Glover and Bellwood, Southeast Asia, pp. 289–94.

23 Ibid., pp. 298–300.

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