In search of Southeast Asia’s trade network: Comparative ceramic analysis

Summary

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 specific socio-political of each site. This paper argues that fine-paste ware analysis is crucial to understanding the region’s trade networks, and is an essential step toward building a baseline database of Southeast Asian ceramics. This initiative will stimulate productive discussion among archaeologists and historians about Southeast Asian trade, and promote the exchange of ideas within the Southeast Asian community.

The earlier phase of this research was presented at the 2012 SAA meeting (Ueda, Wibisono, and Guo 2012) and is part of Ueda’s Ph.D. dissertation, supported by the NSF dissertation improvement grant (award no.: 1332996).

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Cross-cultural encounters/entanglements in Island Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific

Keywords

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