Asia: Southeast Asia (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Klassen.

This paper assesses the relationship between elements of adaptive capacity of a water management system among six time periods. The archaeological case study, Angkor, Cambodia, was the center of the Khmer Empire for over 600 years (9th-15th centuries CE). During this time, the Khmers developed one of the largest and most complex water management systems in the pre-industrial world. In this paper, I use geographic information system analyses to quantitatively and qualitatively assess six elements...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine Larson. Kristin Landau. Laure Dussubieux.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2026, the Corning Museum of Glass—a world-renowned institution for glass studies in upstate New York—will update its major permanent exhibit of historical glass, “35 Centuries of Glass.” This reinstallation is committed to telling a more global, inclusive, and contextualized history of glass that features little-known and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Macrae. Gyles Iannone. Saw Tun Lin. Nyein Chan Soe.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Bagan was an authoritative capital as well as a cosmological and ritual epicenter of Theravada Buddhism for the Classical Burmese Empire during the eleventh to fourteenth centuries CE. Integral in the Buddhist belief system is the notion of merit; achieved through good deeds or donations to the Buddhist Church. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Nicolas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this project is to understand the processes of jade stone manufacture of the Lingling-o, an ancient jade ornamental artifact found in Southeast Asia. As a favored body decoration in prehistoric societies, its distribution through a sea-based trade network in South China Sea, and the manufacture of jade stone materials influence the development of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiyas Bhattacharyya. Alison Carter. Miriam Stark. Sophorn Kim.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The exploration of residential spaces through the study of household archaeology helps create a better understanding of society from multiple perspectives. Previous work on Angkorian households has focused on sites that were within the capital. There has been a record of archaeological occupation within Battambang...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiyas Bhattacharyya. Alison Carter. Miriam Stark. Peter Grave. Lisa Kealhofer.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Incorporation into and connectivity within the Angkorian state (ninth–fifteenth centuries CE) has been studied through the construction of large temples and road/water networks across sites in mainland Southeast Asia (e.g., Hendrickson 2008, 2010; Pottier et al. 2012). However, few scholars have examined how areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piphal Heng. Miriam Stark. Peter Grave. Lisa Kealhofer. Darith Ea.

The Middle Mekong Region played a crucial role in the formation of the pre-Angkorian and Angkor states. Most Angkorian centers are concentrated within the open plains with favorable access to rice cultivation and interconnected by landroutes. Settlements of the Middle Mekong Region are predominantly located within a narrow strip of fertile land between the rivers and the highlands historically associated with different groups of minorities. This paper combines multiple datasets including site...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Margaret Beck.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Method and Theory: Papers in Honor of James M. Skibo, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1988, James Skibo lived and worked in a small village along the Pasil River in the northern Philippines. His observations there of women cooking, and the material traces of vessel use, still have a lasting impact on archaeological ceramic analysis 30 years later. In this paper I consider some of Skibo’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Utting.

This is an abstract from the "The Expanding Bayesian Revolution in Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. By studying stone tool technology, archaeologists and anthropologists shed light on big questions in human prehistory, including how ancient peoples adapted to changing environments, moved throughout landscapes, and interacted with other groups of people. There are many methodological approaches for characterizing stone tool technology,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Piphal Heng.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highland Southeast Asia was historically the domain of ethnic swiddeners, in contrast with the wet rice farmers of lowland states. Recent scholarship has re-envisioned these upland groups as active agents who resisted lowland state domination, rather than viewing them as isolated tribal groups. Highlands located east of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Damien Huffer. Shawn Graham.

During the Colonial era, numerous "trophy skulls" from various Indo-Pacific cultures entered Western museum and private collections, and continue to be sought as "authentic" collector’s items. However, very little bioarchaeological research exists investigating their provenience, intra-cultural variation in decoration and manufacture, and how examples created for Indigenous ritual use differed from those created for sale to Colonial explorers at the beginning of ‘curio’ trade, let alone what...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chin-hsin Liu.

This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologically, Metal Age sites in northeast and central Thailand exhibit different patterns in site formation, size, and mortuary practice. With geophysical characteristics of each region in mind, these differences have led to an on-going discussion on, for example, the origin of metallurgy and cultigens,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelley Esh. Allison Campo. Kimberly Maeyama. Anthony Hewitt.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is responsible for the recovery and identification of missing US servicemembers from past conflicts, including the Vietnam War. This case study involves over 25 years of investigation efforts that led to the recovery of an O-1 Bird Dog pilot shot down over Laos in 1967. The long investigative history for this case...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Kealhofer. Kaseka Phon. Peter Grave. Miriam Stark. Darith Ea.

This is an abstract from the "Paradigms Shift: New Interpretations in Mainland Southeast Asian Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historically, international archaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) has been typically site-focused and ‘origins’ oriented (e.g., agriculture, metalworking). Theoretical framing has been inductive, frequently emphasizing the role of migration in culture change. More recently, interest in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christophe Pottier.

For a quarter of a century, the concepts of an open city and a low density urban megalopolis have largely broadened our understanding of Angkor (Cambodia), which was based on the morpho-chronological vision of a succession of perfectly geometric walled cities. As the researches progressed, the identification of the elements that make up the archaeological landscape of the Great Angkor has been developed, mixing temples, palaces, settlements, reservoirs, road networks, hydraulic systems and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachna Chhay. Piphal Heng. Visoth Chhay. Yukitsugu Tabata.

Stoneware ceramic production began in the 9th century CE in the Angkorian core region, and its cross-draft kiln technology, paste types, and vessel forms changed during its multi-century tradition. This paper compares kiln morphology, ceramic technology and vessel form from two Angkorian kiln sites: the 9th-11th century Bang Kong site, and the 10th-12th century Thnal Mrech. The sites are located in discrete geological regions: one in the Phnom Kulen hills (Thnal Mrech), and the other on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brendan Buckley. Rosanne D'Arrigo. Caroline Ummenhofer. Michael Griffiths. Kyle Hansen.

We have developed millennial length reconstructions of regional hydroclimate using multiple collections of tree cores from throughout Southeast Asia. Several published records of seasonal hydroclimate from Vietnamese cypress represent the most robust and well-replicated tree ring records from the global tropics, and allow for detailed analyses of the regional hydroclimate for multiple seasons. We demonstrate zonal changes in the mean climate over the past millennium with strong linkages to the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joyce White. Mick Griffiths. Cyler N. Conrad. Kathleen Johnson.

Archaeological research in mainland Southeast Asia is a relatively recent endeavor, but as the region’s culture history has become more fully known, a gap in evidence called the "missing millennia" has emerged. The gap falls during the middle Holocene c. 6000-4000 BP when few sites have dated deposits. Yet from evidence dating before and after those millennia, important changes must have occurred, including changes in settlement systems, lithics and ceramic technologies, the appearance of cereal...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cyler Conrad. Caitlin Ainsworth. Emily Lena Jones.

Rabbits and hares are often a central part of human subsistence strategies in both the past and the present. However, the Burmese hare (Lepus peguensis) – the sole member of the family Leporidae indigenous to mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) – is rarely eaten today, and its status in the past is unclear. Although this taxon is currently abundant across a wide geographic range, it has a poor zooarchaeological record during the Pleistocene and Holocene. Identified specimens occur sporadically in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathleen Kelley. Guangmau Xie. Qiang Lin. Miriam Belmaker.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of the main questions in human evolution concerns the dispersal of modern humans into Eurasia. Given the current tropical environment of South China, we may wonder whether early modern humans entering this region could penetrate the rainforest to forage for food, and indeed whether the environment in this area was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Carter. Kelby Beyer.

This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Ancient Glass around the Indian Ocean" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Though Iron Age (500 BCE–500 CE) Southeast Asian glass ornament research is a well-established field, previous studies have almost exclusively examined the glass beads comprising the majority of glass ornament assemblages at Iron Age Southeast Asian sites. Even when other ornament types are noted, these descriptions are of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone.

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. An overview of the extensive use of settlement archaeology in Maya studies provides an entry point for a critical consideration of the comparatively limited role that this method has played in the study of the preindustrial states of Southeast Asia, especially when it comes to investigating the habitation sites of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chin-hsin Liu. Coralia Guandique.

Three adjacent, chronologically overlapped, and metallurgically active sites in central Thailand were excavated by the Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project (TAP). This study focuses on dental pathology (caries, calculus, periapical abscessing, antemortem tooth loss, linear enamel hypoplasia) observed on human skeletal remains from Nil Kham Haeng (500 B.C.-A.D. 600) to investigate possible foodways and lifeways of its inhabitants. Among approximately 20 individuals represented, 16 have sufficient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corinne Watts.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There are numerous megaliths on the islands of Indonesia, including the island of Flores where their constructions date to 2500-1000 BCE. Some of the stones that comprise these megaliths have been trafficked to other countries in recent years. In the early 2000s an Iowa City collector purchased a set of 50 of these standing stones from a location or locations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nia Ridwan.

This paper will focus on the development of marine archaeology in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. It will also highlight the interdisciplinary and integrated marine archaeology research programs in the region having aims to investigating shipwrecks, cargoes, and maritime heritage recent condition as well as identifying human and environmental threats. Marine archaeology research, sustainable shipwreck utilization for tourism development, and local people engagement in underwater cultural heritage...