The environmental and social dimensions of early maritime interaction networks in the South China Sea

Author(s): Francis Allard

Year: 2025

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Maritimity in the Indo-Pacific World" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

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The 1<sup>st</sup> millennium BCE witnessed the expansion of maritime networks linking several coastal areas of the South China Sea. By the middle of the millennium, interaction involved not only the movement of decorative objects of different types (e.g. jade ornaments; glass and stone beads, some originating in South Asia), but also raw materials (e.g. jade) and – some have argued – the artisans themselves. According to many archaeologists, these interaction networks consisted of trade among often distant participants, possibly involving ‘peer-polity interaction’. Importantly, distribution maps of sites and objects indicate a lack of spatial and temporal uniformity, with some northern sectors of the South China Sea apparently left out of trading networks until the 1<sup>st</sup> century BCE. This presentation argues that such unevenness may be explained by the coalescence of several environmental factors, including the strength and direction of seasonal winds and currents, as well as deltaic geomorphology. Furthermore, and in contrast to prevailing views that a shared Austronesian ancestry throughout much of the South China Sea facilitated the development and maintenance of extensive maritime connections over thousands of years, ethnographic evidence suggests that maritime interaction likely involved the participation of multiple distinct social units of limited size.

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Cite this Record

The environmental and social dimensions of early maritime interaction networks in the South China Sea. Francis Allard. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 510241)

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Keywords

General
Mobility • Multi-regional/Comparative

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51696