Southeast Asia (Other Keyword)
1-13 (13 Records)
This paper identifies the ethical and conservation challenges of working with skeletal remains from mainland Southeast Asia, a region including Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar. Due to the increasing political rest experienced over the past decades, researchers have had better opportunities to work in these countries, with relatively easier access to appropriate permissions to excavate archaeological sites. The first-hand accounts of bioarchaeological research conducted by the...
A Comparative Approach to Deciphering Past Agricultural Strategies in the Tropics: The Shared Trends of Resiliency, Vulnerability, and Complexity (2017)
Tropical environments are defined by a shared suite of climatic and environmental variables. These unifying characteristics led past archaeologists to delineate these regions as incapable of fostering state level civilizations. These interpretations presumed a lack of resources required to support agricultural production at the level obligatory for the urban centers that define states. Modern studies in tropical ecology question this perspective by identifying a high degree of localized resource...
Comparative Techniques to Uncover Networks of Ceramic Technology in Southern Vietnam (2017)
The analysis of ceramics in Southeast Asia has evolved from typologies and broad comparative discussions of vessel forms and surface treatments. Like other material culture, studies on ceramics from mainland Southeast Asian prehistoric sites that employ archaeometric techniques have escalated in recent years. The appearance of fine, incised and impressed ceramics in southern Vietnam dating to the Neolithic period (4500-3000 BP) is closely associated with sedentary settlements, cereal...
Cultural Resource Management in the Philippines : Current Practices, Trends and Challenges (2016)
The protection, preservation and conservation of archaeological resources has been a challenge in the Philippines all throughout the years given that there are various threats that endanger their scientific, cultural and educational value. As there are programs and measures the Philippine government carry on including state-enacted cultural/archaeological laws all throughout the country in order to safeguard these valuable resources, it is still the great task and effort to make the general...
The Environmental History of Settlement at Co Loa, Vietnam: A Preliminary Pollen Sequence (2015)
Co Loa is a 600ha Iron Age settlement located in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam. Recent excavations of the three earthen ramparts at Co Loa are illuminating the processes of site construction begun during the Dongson cultural period (600 BC-AD 200). The scale and organization of these efforts reflect a highly centralized and institutionalized authority; however, little is known about the nature of settlement and urban form. Using preliminary palynological data from cores and...
Houses (and Gardens?) at Angkor (2017)
Household archaeology and a focus on residential spaces is an emerging field in Southeast Asia. At Angkor, this approach has great potential for exploring the resiliency of non-elite members of society through changes in environmental and socio-political processes. In this paper we present results from the ongoing analyses of a 2015 excavation of a house mound within the Angkor Wat enclosure. Using a variety of techniques including macro- and micro-botanical analyses, geoarchaeology, soil...
In search of Southeast Asia’s trade network: Comparative ceramic analysis (2015)
Southeast Asia is a region whose inhabitants have long been engaged in long-distance trade connected through ocean and river systems. This paper presents the preliminary results of a petrographic study on earthenware samples from archaeological sites in Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand in order to scientifically investigate the putative trade networks. The preliminary results show a complex picture of local production and imported ceramics, one that changes depending on the location and the...
Investigating the Religious Landscape of Epicenters in Pre-Industrial Tropical States (2017)
The landscape of an epicenter has been built and modified to suit the needs of the people, both non-elite and elite. Epicenters consist of administrative, ceremonial, and residential features within a central precinct, often encircled by a moat or wall. Rulers of early tropical states would use religious propaganda to promote their power and legitimacy, which in turn created the purposeful and sacred design of the epicenter. By using the comparative method, this paper will examine the...
Making It Cool: Modern Lessons in Reinterpreting, Reappropriating and Understanding Hunter Gatherer Studies (2016)
Studies of hunter-gatherers have recently garnered less attention than ever before. This has occurred in large part due to a correlation between a reduced number of forager societies and relevancy with such reduced numbers. In effect, there exists a dogma where studying hunter-gatherers is no longer pertinent to today’s society, nor to the anthropological subfield. However, my paper begs to differ. Hunter-gatherer studies, specifically my own amongst modern populations of the Ata of Negros...
The Maritime Silk Route and Southeast China during the Han dynasty: A view from Panyu, Hepu, and Lingnan’s hinterland (2017)
Consisting of the present-day provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong, the Lingnan region was from early on impacted by political and cultural forces centered to its north. Following Lingnan’s brief occupation by the Qin (214 – 204 BCE), the Qin general Zhao Tuo established the independent kingdom of Nanyue, whose defeat at the hands of Han armies in 111 BCE resulted in the region’s formal incorporation into the Han Empire. Importantly, various lines of evidence dating to the Han dynasty point to...
Moving on from Movius: Recent Research in Pleistocene Archaeology in Myanmar (2017)
For many archaeologists, Myanmar is known as the place where Hallam Movius proposed the Movius Line as a result of his fieldwork in the 1930s. Movius proposed this line as a major cultural boundary of the Palaeolithic era, with bifacial technology present in the west and north, but absent to the south and east. His line continues to have a major influence on contemporary discussions of human evolution in the Eastern Hemisphere. Motivated by debates about the line, and other questions about the...
One Foot in the Field and the Other in the Forest: Indigenous "State Hedging" in Cambodia and Beyond. (2016)
This essay uses a comparative approach to investigate the practice of "state hedging" deployed by various peoples moving in and out of the margins of large-scale historical states. Among these peoples are the Kuy ethnic group whose communities in north-central Cambodia have invited me to study them as their traditional forests rapidly disappear. Kuy methods of "state hedging" and the outcomes of pursuing this practice will be compared with the use of similar tactics by peoples in Africa and the...
Rice Terraces as Defensive Structures: Landscape Modeling in Hapao, Ifugao (2015)
This paper investigates the potential defensive functions of rice terrace construction in Ifugao, Philippines, through an exploration of how landscape analysis and 3D modeling might contribute to established archaeological and ethnographic understandings of the region. While still under debate, a growing body of archaeological evidence suggests that the settlement of the Ifugao highlands and the development of intensive rice terrace farming may have been a strategy for avoiding political...