Recent Developments in East and Southeast Asian Archaeology II: Sites, Landscape, and Environment

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhao Deyun.

Stone-cist graves are one of the most remarkable local discoveries in the mountains of Southwest China. Research on stone-cist graves has helped our understanding of various aspects of local cultural history, but there are many questions remaining such as chronology, the sequence of cultural developments, past social structures, as well as the origin and distribution of stone-cist graves. This paper introduces both previous advances and remaining challenges for research on this body of material,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Darith Ea. Kyle Latinis.

The popular narrative places Koh Ker as a short-lived, unconventionally planned, 10th century Angkorian city carved out of remote jungle following a capital shift under the reign of Jayavarman IV. The capital subsequently returned to Angkor and Koh Ker was swallowed by time and forest. A growing number of researchers find this untenable, seeing Koh Ker as a more sizeable, complex and enduring urban phenomenon based on recent investigations. 2015 excavations in the central urban core yielded...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jina Heo.

Mahan, composed of 54 polities in central and southwestern Korea, grew rapidly from 100 BCE to CE 300, by which time it covered about 40,000 square kilometers, with a population of roughly 500,000. During much of this time, urban zones became the dominant residential mode at both local and regional levels, but without suggesting a strong central authority. No unequivocal capital cities have been identified. At the same time, there is evidence of a dual-urban organization with distinctive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison Weisskopf. Dorian Fuller.

While grain crops, such as rice, are relatively easy to identify in the archaeobotanical record, evidence for early agriculture in the wet tropics can be elusive. In this region staple foods were not always grain-based and even today wild plants play an important role. So how do we identify ancient food pathways? Unlike temperate parts of the world, charred material rarely preserves, so this is where micro fossils such as phytoliths and starches come into play. I use phytoliths in combination...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cyler N. Conrad.

Southeast Asia’s prehistoric zooarchaeological record is peculiar: faunal assemblages are seemingly ‘diverse,’ and generally include a large number of mammalian/reptilian/avian and molluscan species, but often these assemblages lack telltale evidence for human consumption. Therefore, one of the primary challenges confronting zooarchaeologists in this region is identifying what taxa were actually exploited by prehistoric foragers and how these patterns changed over time. This paper investigates...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alison K. Carter. Cristina Castillo. Rachna Chhay. Tegan McGillivray. Yijie Zhuang.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nanny Kim.

About 43 very important silver mines and some 6 copper mines are known to have been worked between the early 15th and the mid-19th century across the Far Southwest of China and in the borderlands beyond. Written sources on mining in the Ming and Qing periods are so scarce that in some cases we identified sites before eventually finding their historical names. Under ideal research conditions, this paper would present archaeological surveys on these sites. In the real world of greatly improved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Francis Allard.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ben Marwick. Kyaw Khaing. Maria Schaarschmidt. Tony Dosseto. Alastair Cunningham.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Liu Huashi.

In recent years, a large number of Neolithic remains have been found in the middle reaches of the Dadu River in Southwest China, most importantly in the valleys of Hanyuan and Shimian. Excavations conducted at the settlement cluster around Maiping site have led to the discovery of numerous features and object finds displaying strong local characteristics. This paper introduces these finds, highlighting their importance for understanding of local prehistoric developments. The middle Dadu River...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zhou Kehua.

Recent years have seen a large number of archaeological discoveries in Sichuan; especially during the construction of the Xiangjiaba Hydropower Station in Yibin, Southern Sichuan, which led to four years of excavation covering an area of over 6000 sq. m. These excavations brought to light a large number of remains from the late Neolithic, Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han periods, greatly advancing our understanding of local cultural developments. The present paper will introduce some of these recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Hoerman.

Multiple indigenous and intrusive Borneo rock art (the additive or reductive human modification of naturally fixed-in-place stone) traditions depict figures and abstract designs that can be interpreted as sexed/gendered. Dating from the terminal Pleistocene through modern period, these images are an untapped source of archaeological information regarding the roles and interactions of the biological sexes and culturally constructed and ascribed genders. This paper uses rock art to identify and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xin Zhonghua.

Xiaguanzi site in Maoxian County, located at the junction of the upper reaches of Min and Fu Rivers, is an important node on the channels of culture transmission between North and South China. From 2014 to 2015, Neolithic remains and stone-constructed tombs were excavated. The Neolithic remains include pottery, stone and bone artifacts, leather objects, animal bones, plant seeds, house remains, tombs, and ash pits. Although there no painted pottery occurred at Xiaguanzi, the pottery found here...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Klassen. Jonathan Weed. Damian Evans.

One of the largest puzzles for archaeologists at Angkor is untangling the extremely complex chronological development of the site. The region was host to hundreds of years of urban occupation arising out of a long tradition of habitation through the Bronze and Iron Age. Decades of archaeological investigations have established relational frameworks through which it is now possible to do more precise dating. Recent LiDAR investigations and the associated mapping and ground truthing have...