Moving on from Movius: Recent Research in Pleistocene Archaeology in Myanmar

Summary

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 place of Myanmar in the modern human colonisation of Southeast Asia and Australia, I began fieldwork with local collaborators in Myanmar in 2016. In this talk I present results from the first research at Pleistocene sites in Myanmar since Movius' expedition. I discuss the implications for the debates about the line, and about broad patterns of human evolution in Southeast Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Recent Developments in East and Southeast Asian Archaeology II: Sites, Landscape, and Environment

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14851