Connecting prehistoric and historic cultures in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Linking the early historic cultures of Southeast Asia to their prehistoric antecedents has, despite some decades of research, proved difficult for a number of reasons. Until the 1960s, this did not seem to be an issue for scholars of the region. For George Coedès, the region was simply occupied by diverse and backward ethnic and linguistic communities, cultivators using stone tools, or at best, people using bronze with poorly developed social organisations until impacted by the expanding Han peoples during the third century CE: ‘There is very little direct information about the societies of South East Asia before they entered into contact with India and China.’