Southeast Asia is a paradox to Western scholars. Few are familiar with its history, yet Southeast Asia has been a veritable intellectual resource extraction zone for twentieth- and twenty-first-century social thought: imagined communities, galactic polities, agricultural involution and the moral economy of peasants all emanate from work done in Southeast Asia. The region's archaeological record is equally paradoxical: late Pleistocene ‘Hobbit’ hominins disrupt models of human origins, the world's largest Buddhist monument of Borobudur now sits in a wholly Muslim land mass in central Java, and the world's largest premodern city of Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that remains resolutely rural. So we should not be surprised that Scott's Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest states draws from a career in Southeast Asian studies to study human history (the entire Anthropocene). This essay concentrates on how Scott believes early Mesopotamian states became legible.

Radiocarbon dates from recent excavations of a range of Angkorian Khmer (~9th–14th CE) stoneware kiln complexes provide a new and independent perspective on the timing and geography of Khmer ceramic production. These data demonstrate a clear two-phase sequence. The first, in the late 9th to late 12th centuries CE, marks a period of intensive production located both to the east of Angkor and to the south at Cheung Ek, south of Phnom Penh. A second shorter phase of production occurred in the late 13th to late 14th CE at more distant provincial settings following the collapse of the Angkorian state.

Studies of early Southeast Asia focus largely on its ‘classical states’, when rulers and their entourages from Sukhothai and Ayutthaya (Thailand), Angkor (Cambodia), Bagan (Myanmar), Champa and Dai Viet (Vietnam) clashed, conquered, and intermarried one another over an approximately six-century-long quest for legitimacy and political control. Scholarship on Southeast Asia has long held that such transformations were largely a response to outside intervention and external events, or at least that these occurred in interaction with a broader world system in which Southeast Asians played key roles. As research gathered pace on the prehistory of the region over the past five decades or so, it has become increasingly clear that indigenous Southeast Asian cultures grew in sophistication and complexity over the Iron Age in particular. This has led archaeologists to propose much greater agency in regard to the selective adaptation of incoming Indic beliefs and practices than was previously assumed under early scholarship of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century.

Considerable attention has been devoted to the architecture and art history of Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple in the last century. There has, however, been little research on the functions and internal organisation of the large rectangular enclosure surrounding the temple. Such enclosures have long been assumed to have been sacred precincts, or perhaps ‘temple-cities’: work exploring the archaeological patterning for habitation within them has been limited. The results of LiDAR survey and excavation have now revealed evidence for low-density residential occupation in these areas, possibly for those servicing the temple. Recent excavations within the enclosure challenge our traditional understanding of the social hierarchy of the Angkor Wat community and show that the temple precinct, bounded by moat and wall, may not have been exclusively the preserve of the wealthy or the priestly elite.

Interest in the material correlates of economic specialization has led to numerous quantitative studies of standardization (or the lack of it) in craft production, particularly of ceramics. Most of this research has focused on measures of variation and conventional statistical procedures in the treatment of the empirical data, many of which are dependent on unrealistic assumptions (such as normal populations), yielding results that can be questioned. To resolve this crisis more robust statistical methods are investigated including the “jackknife” method (for confidence interval construction) and a multigroup test for homogeneity of variance known as the Brown-Forsythe Test. Computer simulations show that the latter is robust under a variety of distributional forms. These new methods are used to reanalyze ethnoarchaeological ceramic data from the Philippines; it is shown that markedly different conclusions can be reached when compared with the results of more conventional procedures.