Southeast Asia, Archaeology of

Abstract

Southeast Asia refers to the region covered by the modern nation-states of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, East Timor, Brunei, and the Philippines. This tropical region's prehistoric sequence, summarized in this article, extends back to at least one million years ago with the occupation by Homo erectus. The archaeological record of anatomically modern humans extends back to approximately 40,000 years ago. By the early Holocene, hunter-gatherers appear to have occupied much of Southeast Asia. Rice-farming communities appeared in the third millennium BC, and by the early mid-second millennium BC, autonomous village communities in mainland Southeast Asia began to produce and use copper/bronze ornaments and utilitarian objects. Around the mid-first millennium BC, complex polities developed which entailed (with regional variation), for example, larger settlements integrated into regional hierarchies; iron production; increased scale of bronze production and variety of bronzes crafted; intensification of wet rice cultivation; and participation in maritime and long-distance exchange relations. State-level polities are traditionally thought to have arisen in Southeast Asia during the early centuries AD. From the mid-first millennium AD, historic Southeast Asia states are better known. As with some of the earlier states, they exhibit a shared incorporation of Indian legal, political, and religious ideas and institutions.