Southeast Asian prehistory

Paleo-landscape investigations contextualize how people have inhabited and coevolved dynamically with their landforms, resource zones, and social-ecological niches during measured time intervals and through extended chronological sequences. Toward illustrating this research potential, changing paleo-landscapes 2500–1500 BC reveal the ancient conditions of the places where people lived in both Taiwan and the northern Philippines, in this case exploring what transpired there during a critical time period that heralded deep transformation of the language history, cultural heritage, economic production, and population demography of Island Southeast Asia as known today. During the time range of interest, the region’s coastlines and habitat configurations were substantially different from today’s circumstances, prior to change in sea level, accelerated slope erosion, lowland sedimentary buildup, and some of the world’s most rapid recorded tectonic uplift. The results show that people in eastern Taiwan at 2200–2000 BC faced a crisis of limited suitable landforms for their particular mode of subsistence economy, thus instigating overseas migration to the northern Philippines as a means to expand into other territories, with continued effects through 1500 BC and thereafter.

In the last centuries BC at the time of the early trans-indian maritime exchanges with Southeast Asia, recent archaeological data found in Central Thailand at Khao Sam Kaeo and its surrounding coast show new ceramic marker groups. As the "Three coloured wares" previously described by late Wilhelm Solheim, the ceramics provide evidence through ancient network of strong ethnical links along inhabitants from coastal South China Sea between Southern Vietnam, Philippine archipelago and the area of Koh Samui and Chumpon province...

Plant macrofossils from the sites of Khao Sam Kaeo and Phu Khao Thong on the Thai-Malay Peninsula show evidence of cross-cultural interactions, particularly between India to the west and Southeast Asia to the east. Archaeobotanical analysis of various cereals, beans and other crops from these assemblages sheds light on the spread and adoption of these species for local agriculture. There is also early evidence for the trade of key commodities such as cotton. The plant remains illustrate a variety of influences and networks of contact across South and Southeast Asia during the late first millennium BC.

The ‘Southeast Asian Lead Isotope Project’ (SEALIP) is intended to provide reliable geochemical proxies for late prehistoric through early historic (2nd/1st millennium BCE and 1st millennium CE) local, regional, and inter-regional social interactions, in an archaeological arena lacking established ceramic typologies with which to cross modern national boundaries. We present lead isotope characterisations of the three currently known Southeast Asian prehistoric primary (mining/smelting) copper production centres: Phu Lon and the Khao Wong Prachan Valley in Thailand, and the recently discovered Xepon complex in Laos. Kernel Density Estimation shows that these production centres can be clearly distinguished isotopically, as such fulfilling the core tenet of the ‘Provenance Hypothesis’ (Wilson and Pollard, 2001: 508) and permitting SEALIP to proceed as a research programme tracing regional copper/bronze/lead exchange and provenance patterning. In addition we provide a provisional technological reconstruction of copper smelting processes at Phu Lon to complement our more established understanding of the Khao Wong Prachan Valley. Combined lead isotope and technological datasets allow us to tentatively identify trends in the evolution of Southeast Asian metal technologies and of regional social perceptions of metal exchange.► Three prehistoric Southeast Asian copper production loci studied. ► Centres can be distinguished by lead isotope analysis. ► Extractive technology similarities may exist. ► Two of three centres importing as well as producing metal. ► First empirical evidence linking Iron Age Cambodia and Laos.