The Current State of Settlement Archaeology in the Study of Southeast Asia’s Preindustrial State Formations: The Critical Appraisal of a Scholarly Interloper

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

An overview of the extensive use of settlement archaeology in Maya studies provides an entry point for a critical consideration of the comparatively limited role that this method has played in the study of the preindustrial states of Southeast Asia, especially when it comes to investigating the habitation sites of the commoner segment of the population. It is argued that the perpetual underdevelopment of settlement archaeology—and specifically the failure to generate comprehensive, empirical datasets representing the diverse support populations of these early state formations—means that our interpretations continue to be biased toward the upper echelons of society. Although recent macroscale remote sensing programs and sophisticated computer analyses have generated relevant insights concerning the significance of the ground plans of urban centers and their immediate surroundings, these coarse-grained studies have also unintentionally drawn scholarly interest even further away from the much-needed microscale excavation of suburban, peri-urban, and rural occupation loci. Representing the largest and most diverse segment of the population, such sites contain the precise types of fine-grained data that are needed to generate a bottom-up perspective on daily life in the ancient societies we are so captivated by.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Current State of Archaeological Research across Southeast Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36114.0