The Missing Big Picture: Settlement Size and Patterns in Western Mainland Southeast Asia during the First Millennium CE

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How were cities distributed in Mainland Southeast Asia in the past? What were the population estimates and patterns in the cities? Answering these questions leads to an understanding of long-term urbanization patterns, and the historical legacies associated with the geographical effects on development. However, to date, there is no comprehensive record of spatially explicit, settlement-level population data at a regional scale. Here, I develop a dataset of cities and settlements across Myanmar, Thailand, and Peninsula Malaysia in the first millennium CE using historical and archaeological records. This research refines Southeast Asian data presented in the global series on population estimates developed by Chandler and Modelski and addresses the data weakness mentioned by recent works from Reba, Reitma, and Seto (2016). The dataset is the first to identify the macro-pattern of settlement distribution in Southeast Asia. The study takes a different approach from Southeast Asian literature on urbanism and explores the history of urbanization across the landscape. It identifies three unique instances across time and multi-polar centers of agglomeration during the first millennium CE. Finally, I provide the first macro-population estimates for the region. This serves to help refine analysis on drivers of growth and constraints on regional agglomeration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Regional Settlement Networks Analysis: A Global Comparison

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33232