History Of Southeast Asia Research Articles

A New history of Southeast Asia

A New history of Southeast Asia

Evolutionary History of Helicobacter pylori Sequences Reflect Past Human Migrations in Southeast Asia

The human population history in Southeast Asia was shaped by numerous migrations and population expansions. Their reconstruction based on archaeological, linguistic or human genetic data is often hampered by the limited number of informative polymorphisms in classical human genetic markers, such as the hypervariable regions of the mitochondrial DNA. Here, we analyse housekeeping gene sequences of the human stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori from various countries in Southeast Asia and we provide evidence that H. pylori accompanied at least three ancient human migrations into this area: i) a migration from India introducing hpEurope bacteria into Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia; ii) a migration of the ancestors of Austro-Asiatic speaking people into Vietnam and Cambodia carrying hspEAsia bacteria; and iii) a migration of the ancestors of the Thai people from Southern China into Thailand carrying H. pylori of population hpAsia2. Moreover, the H. pylori sequences reflect iv) the migrations of Chinese to Thailand and Malaysia within the last 200 years spreading hspEasia strains, and v) migrations of Indians to Malaysia within the last 200 years distributing both hpAsia2 and hpEurope bacteria. The distribution of the bacterial populations seems to strongly influence the incidence of gastric cancer as countries with predominantly hspEAsia isolates exhibit a high incidence of gastric cancer while the incidence is low in countries with a high proportion of hpAsia2 or hpEurope strains. In the future, the host range expansion of hpEurope strains among Asian populations, combined with human motility, may have a significant impact on gastric cancer incidence in Asia.

Gender Pluralism: Muslim Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times

This paper examines three big ideas: difference, legitimacy, and pluralism. Of chief concern is how people construe and deal with variation among fellow human beings. Why under certain circumstances do people embrace or even sanctify differences, or at least begrudgingly tolerate them, and why in other contexts are people less receptive to difference, sometimes overtly hostile to it and bent on its eradication? What are the cultural and political conditions conducive to the positive valorization and acceptance of difference? And, conversely, what conditions undermine or erode such positive views and acceptance? Taking as its point of departure the prevalence of transgendered ritual specialists and the prestige accorded them throughout much of Southeast Asia's history, this paper examines pluralism with respect to gender and sexuality among Southeast Asian Muslims since the early modern era, which historians and anthropologists of the region commonly define as the period extending roughly from the 15th to the 18th centuries

The prehistory of Southeast Asia: a retrospective view of 40 years research

When David Clark asked me in 1970 to contribute a chapter on Southeast Asia for hisnew book, Models in archaeology, I faced a dilemma. What could one say about an areathe size of Western Europe of which virtually nothing was known? So I entitled mychapter 'Initial model formulation in terraincognita' and speculated on the basis ofthe handful of sites that had been excavated (Higham 1972). Nor was the prognosisfor the area at all promising. The war inVietnam was spilling over into Laos andCambodia. China remained a looming voidto the north, Burma was not receptiveand Malaysia did not welcome foreignarchaeologists. Only Thailand shone likea welcoming beacon.

The prehistory of a Friction Zone: first farmers and hunters-gatherers in Southeast Asia

The prime-mover for the arrival of the Neolithic in Island Southeast Asia is thought to be the expansion of rice farmers speaking an Austronesian language and coming from the north (see Spriggs, above). Much less is known of the indigenous hunter-gatherers and their interaction with the new farming communities. The mutually occupied area, in the definition of Peter Bellwood, was a ‘Friction Zone’, where two radically different cultures met. This paper emphasises how much land, and information, was lost when the rising sea drowned Sundaland, an area the size of India, and brings to bear archaeological and DNA evidence to emphasise the continuing role of hunter-gatherers in the later prehistory of Southeast Asia.

Finance and long‐term development issues in Southeast Asia

This article analyses Southeast Asian finance over more than a century in light of three issues: the realisation of finance‐leading development; indigenous entrepreneurship; and effective credit provision in rural areas. Colonial currency board systems and non‐interventionist government characterised finance in pre‐World War II Southeast Asia. There was decisive change after independence to a variety of state‐directed, or indeed socialist, attempts to overcome unfavourable pre‐war development legacies. Despite these departures, the article finds that throughout Southeast Asian history, finance rarely, if ever, led development. Today, indigenous entrepreneurship, explored for Malaysia, is generally either bolstered by political patrons or even entirely substituted for by state finance. More positively, market‐aware state initiatives in microfinance may offer a realistic institutional alternative to rural Southeast Asia's historic reliance on informal finance.

Anything but a backwater

In the spring of 1970, tired of the chilly Philadelphia winters where I was studying archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, I arranged to spend a semester at the University of Hawai'i. There I enrolled in Professor Wilhelm G. Solheim II's course inthe prehistory of Southeast Asia. Bill Solheim — a colorful character if ever there was one, with his handle-bar mustache and endless anecdotes — was just then stirring up the sleepy field of Southeast Asian archaeology and prehistory. Together with his graduate students Chet Gorman and Don Bayard, Bill was making all kinds of startling claims about thecourse of cultural evolution in what most scholars had taken to be a secondary backwater: evidence for strikingly early plant domestication from Spirit Cave, precocious advances in bronze metallurgy at Non Nok Tah, and similar claims. At the time, Peter Bellwood, then based at the University of Auckland, was still focused on research among the islands of eastern Polynesia. But Peter saw the exciting developments coming out of Southeast Asia and soon decamped to The Australian National University in Canberra. Out of this new base he began his long and fruitful career of fieldwork in island Southeast Asia, and as the preeminent synthesiser of the region's prehistory.

Were bamboo tools made in prehistoric Southeast Asia? An experimental view from South China

The use of bamboo by hominins in Southeast Asia has long been used as an explanation for the lack of stone tool innovation and diversity in that region during the Pleistocene. The paleoenvironmental and ethnographic basis of “Bamboo hypothesis” has been critiqued recently, but those factors are not directly relevant to the question of whether prehistoric hominins actually used bamboo. There is an even more rudimentary question that should be answered first: is it even possible to make complex bamboo tools with simple flaked cobble tool industries? This paper shows that it is indeed possible to procure and manipulate bamboo in a variety of ways with replicated stone tools. Not all bamboo stems are of equal quality, which should add a layer of intricacy in need of consideration by any future advocate of the Bamboo Hypothesis. Pilot knapping studies are also discussed, and suggest that the raw material constraints presented by local raw materials may generally be given undue weight in the morphological appearance of Southeast Asian Pleistocene stone tools.

FORCED LABOUR AND RISING FERTILITY IN COLONIAL INDONESIA

This paper presents empirical evidence to support the labour demand theory of rising reproductive fertility in colonial Indonesia. According to this theory, birth rates in nineteenth-century Java rose as a direct result of the labour burden imposed upon women and their children by the Cultivation System of compulsory labour services. The theory was conceived in the 1970s as a reaction against the assumption that rapid population growth in colonial Indonesia must have reflected improvements in economic and health conditions under Dutch rule. The difficulty of testing the labour demand theory empirically, together with its counterintuitive quality and its ideological origins, led it to be sceptically received. However, newly-assembled statistical data from Minahasa—one of the few areas outside Java where compulsory cultivation services were introduced in the nineteenth century—suggest that the theory is in fact correct. The existence of a positive link between labour demand and fertility helps explain not only the paradox of population growth without rapid economic growth or public health improvements in nineteenth-century Java, but also the ‘involutionary’ cycle of agricultural intensification, population growth and impoverishment which seems to be a recurrent feature of Southeast Asian history.

Phylogenetic relationships of the Orang Asli and Iban of Malaysia based on maternal markers

Malaysia remains as a crossroad of different cultures and peoples, and it has long been recognized that studying its population history can provide crucial insight into the prehistory of Southeast Asia as a whole. The earliest inhabitants were the Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia and the indigenous groups in Sabah and Sarawak. Although they were the earliest migrants in this region, these tribes are divided geographically by the South China Sea. We analyzed DNA sequences of 18 Orang Asli using mitochondrial DNA extracted from blood samples, each representing one sub-tribe, and from five Sarawakian Iban. Mitochondrial DNA was extracted from hair samples in order to examine relationships with the main ethnic groups in Malaysia. The D-loop region and cytochrome b genes were used as the candidate loci. Phylogenetic relationships were investigated using maximum parsimony and neighbor joining algorithms, and each tree was subjected to bootstrap analysis with 1000 replicates. Analyses of the HVS I region showed that the Iban are not a distinct group from the Orang Asli; they form a sub-clade within the Orang Asli. Based on the cytochrome b gene, the Iban clustered with the Orang Asli in the same clade. We found evidence for considerable gene flow between Orang Asli and Iban. We concluded that the Orang Asli, Iban and the main ethnic groups of Malaysia are probably derived from a common ancestor. This is in agreement with a single-route migration theory, but it does not dismiss a two-route migration theory.

Large lytic cranial lesions: A differential diagnosis from pre‐Angkorian Cambodia

ABSTRACTA late pre‐Angkorian period, c. 350 BC ‐ 200 AD, cemetery has been excavated in the village of Phum Snay, in northwestern Cambodia. In addition to the cemetery sample, a large sample of stratigraphically unprovenanced human skeletal material was uncovered in the village through extensive looting over the last 5–10 years. Both sample sets were available for study but the latter is comprised of only isolated bone elements. The differential diagnosis of the cause of lesions in one isolated cranial vault from this sample is presented here. Widespread, primarily lytic, lesions are concentrated on the frontal and anterior parietal bones, with an additional large lesion on the occipital bone. Lesions vary in size ranging from approximately 5–30 mm in diameter. A detailed description of these lesions is given and a differential diagnosis is presented that includes infectious disease, such as osteomyelitis, tuberculosis and treponemal disease, and also several forms of cancer including metastatic carcinoma, meningioma and multiple myeloma, and finally Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis. The diagnosis is difficult, given the lack of material, but it is suggested that one of the forms of Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis is the most likely candidate. The presence of such large and diffuse lesions is unusual in prehistoric Southeast Asia so the significance of this is also discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Escaping the burdens of Chineseness

Although Singapore currently makes it impossible in the male descent line, departing from Chineseness has been a common phenomenon in Southeast Asian history. In modern nationalist times the paucity of alternative terms in Southeast Asian and European language has made the overused Cina a problematic label, impossible to detach from a very large northern neighbour and from many cultural stereotypes. Naturally many local-born and culturally hybrid citizens have sought to escape from it. The best documented mass case is the nineteenth century Philippines. Peranakan Indonesians have not found it so easy to shed this inappropriate label even though it has occasionally been wielded as a death threat. ‘Outsider’ status also has its uses. This presentation will be chiefly concerned with the obstacles for Peranakan in departing from Chineseness. It will argue nevertheless that many Indonesians are quietly succeeding in taking this path.

MISSING TYPES: OVERCOMING THE TYPOLOGY DILEMMA OF LITHIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.

In Europe as well as in the Americas, typology of at least some key forms was and still is the basis of relative chronology. For Southeast Asian prehistory, attempts to classify lithic assemblages morphologically and technologically in order to fit them into established stone tool typologies from other parts of the world have not proved to be very useful. Up to now, the formation of a specific regional typology system has failed. Session 1C of the 18 Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association at Manila (Fig. 1) wanted to explore the “missing types”-problem and adjacent questions. Is the typological approach not appropriate to the special characteristics and circumstances of lithic industries in Southeast Asia? Why do we know of only a few formal “Asian” types and how did the availability and acquisition of raw material influence lithic technology? Are morphological features of lithic artefacts significant enough at all to establish an acceptable chronology system of lithic periods? How can morphological features of lithic artefacts be linked to geostratigraphy in Southeast Asia? Can non-stratified surface finds contribute to Palaeolithic and Neolithic chronologies in that region? And if we dismiss the typological approach, what are the alternatives? Mirroring the state of discussion in lithic analysis in Southeast Asian archaeology, the contributions of the session covered a broad range of subjects. With his talk titled “River basin archaeology” Israel B. Cabanilla (University of the Philippines) reviewed aspects of early Philippine prehistory and site formation. Palaeolithic sites in the Philippines seemingly date back to 400-500,000 years. While most of the investigated Palaeolithic sites are situated in Northern Luzon and on Palawan Island, Cabanilla focused in his talk on the river basins of the Manila area. In his examination of the vast collection of H. Otley Beyer (1947), a pioneer in Philippine archaeology, and of various surveys of the National Museum conducted since the 1960s by Robert Fox and others, Cabanilla revealed that a major share of lithic artefacts originate from the Manila region and are associated with the tributaries of Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay like Marilao, Pasig and Santa Mesa. In her presentation on “Pleistocene stone tools of New Guinea: a new analysis from the Far East of the Far East”, Susan Bulmer (Auckland, New Zealand) mooted artefacts from New Guinea which have long been ignored. Stone tool assemblages from five excavations in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea were restudied: four rockshelters in and near the Wahgi Valley, and one openair site, a natural swamp that was first cultivated at around 10,000 BP. Bulmer focused mainly on Pleistocene axes and axe-like tools and compared the evidence of the Highlands with two other Pleistocene sites, Bobongara and Kosipe, the former found on the former coastline and the latter found high on the edge of the upper mountain forest. The types defined are based on empirical attributes such as size, shape, the position and nature of their working edges, and the wear they exhibit. A provisional chronology of the stone tools has been suggested.

Navigating communities: race, place, and travel in the history of maritime Southeast Asia

This paper examines intersecting notions of distance, place and community across Insular Southeast Asia for the last several hundred years. The piece is not an attempt to chronicle all these affiliations over time and space, but is rather an effort to re-think how people have moved in Southeast Asian history, who they did this with and why. The essay is divided into three parts. The first section looks at some of the meanings of place in the last five centuries, as place has pertained to communities in ‘centers’ and maritime ‘peripheries’, as well as in several supposedly discrete arenas. The second section focuses on people, and how different communities in Southeast Asia have envisioned the terms and conditions of movement in divergent ways. The last third of the paper concentrates on period, or how conceptions of community, distance and travel have changed over time. It is hoped that this essay will show how all three of these variables – people, place, and periodization – have intersected in specific, complicated ways in shaping local notions of ‘community’.

An Early Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia, 900–1300 CE

One of the most influential ideas in Southeast Asian history in recent decades has been Anthony Reid'sAge of Commercethesis, which sees a commercial boom and the emergence of port cities as hubs of commerce over the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, which in turn spurred political, social and economic changes throughout the region. But how new were the changes described in Reid'sAge of Commerce? This paper argues that the four centuries from circa 900 to 1300 CE can be seen as an ‘Early Age of Commerce’ in Southeast Asia. During this period, a number of commercial and financial changes in China, South Asia, the Middle East and within the Southeast Asian region, greatly promoted maritime trade, which induced the emergence of new ports and urban centres, the movement of administrative capitals toward the coast, population expansion, increased maritime links between societies, the expansion of Theravada Buddhism and Islam, increased monetisation, new industries, new forms of consumption and new mercantile organisations. It is thus proposed that the period from 900 to 1300 be considered the Early Age of Commerce in Southeast Asian history.

Human migration in prehistoric South East Asia: The chemical and biological evidence

Human migration in prehistoric South East Asia: The chemical and biological evidence

Earth in Flower: The Divine Mystery of the Cambodian Dance Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Earth in Flower: The Divine Mystery of the Cambodian Dance Drama Toni Shapiro-phim Earth in Flower: The Divine Mystery of the Cambodian Dance Drama. By Paul Cravath. Holmes Beach, FL: DatASIA, 2008. xxx, 544 pp., 188 illus. Cloth, $128.00. Earth in Flower is a slight revision of Paul Cravath’s 1985 PhD dissertation on the court dance of Cambodia, an art form with a historically intimate connection to the land and its spirits. Except for the addition of some photographs, the publisher notes that he chose to “remain true to Dr. Cravath’s . . . doctoral thesis without modifying, deleting, or rewriting content which reflects attitudes or conventions of use that have changed in the past twenty years” (xxiii). The book is a treasure trove. It includes more than 180 photographs, drawings, and paintings; listings of early and mid twentieth-century Royal Palace performance programs; an extensive bibliography of Chinese, Dutch, English, and French sources, as well as English- and French-language publications by Khmer writers; and chapters that start with Southeast Asian prehistory and conclude with the dance’s ritual function. Cravath arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to undertake research for a degree in theater just as the civil war was tightening its grip on the capital city in early 1975. Before being evacuated to Thailand as Cambodia was about to fall to the communist revolutionaries, he gained access to manuscripts and photographs, some of which were destroyed during the following years of turmoil. The Khmer Rouge, under the infamous Pol Pot, took control of the capital in April 1975. By the time that regime was ousted in January 1979, an estimated 80–90 percent of the country’s professional artists (including dancers, musicians, playwrights, and poets), along with close to two million of their compatriots, had perished from starvation and disease or had been executed. Aspects of the cultural knowledge of those who died vanished as well. Therefore this volume presents a unique portrait. Since 1979, Cambodia’s artistic community has been re-creating what it could of the traditional repertoire, with surviving artists painstakingly recalling their embodied wisdom and skills. Performers also continue to develop new works. A resource such as Cravath’s is valuable in filling in some of the lacunae in the historic record, yet aspects of that record here are in need of correcting and updating. [End Page 170] Chapter 1 outlines Cravath’s perspective of Cambodia’s classical dance tradition. Cravath sides with historians who posit a Southeast Asian–centric view of Khmer cultural beliefs and practices, wherein the Khmer are given agency for the creation and continuity of their dance as opposed to the art being viewed as derivative of Indian forms.1 Cravath concludes that “[f ]or Khmer dance drama, India may have provided a literary medium for mythological expression, and in a much later period the Thai influenced it as well. But in form, in structure, in spirit, and in the selective process operative in its evolution, the dance drama—like the culture in which it flowered—is exclusively a reflection of the Cambodian people” (7). Chapter 2 examines archeological, sculptural, and epigraphic evidence up to the reign of King Jayavarman II (802–850) in order to establish the long connection of Khmer dance with both temples and monarchs. Chapter 3 focuses on dance during the time of the Angkor Empire (ninth to fifteenth centuries), when Khmer kings ruled over vast parts of mainland Southeast Asia. Sculpted dancing figures grace the numerous stone temples constructed in that era, and evidence points to dramatic performances by dancers associated with royalty. Chapter 4 takes us from the mid fifteenth-century fall of Angkor up to the early 1980s. Codification of Khmer classical dance gestures occurred during the reign of Ang Duong (1848–1860), according to a 1963 publication of the Cambodian Information Department. Cravath notes that Norodom Sihanouk’s first time as king (1941–1955) and then as prince and head of state (1955 until a 1970 coup d’état) saw the dance linked with Cambodia’s nationalist agenda. The dancers, accompanying Sihanouk on travels overseas, came to represent the country to the larger world. Yet, until the 1970s, the...

A new chronological framework for prehistoric Southeast Asia, based on a Bayesian model from Ban Non Wat

AbstractThe authors offer a new chronological framework for prehistoric Southeast Asia, based mainly on the Bayesian modelling of 75 radiocarbon dates from well-stratified excavations at Ban Non Wat. The results are revolutionary. Neolithic practice now begins in the second millennium and hierarchical state-forming activity is dated to a ‘starburst’ around 1000 BC. The authors reflect on the social implications of the new model – and on the criteria for an ever stronger chronology.

Engendering Australian and Southeast Asian Prehistory ... ‘beyond epistemological angst’

This paper overviews Sandra Bowdler’s unique contribution to engendering Australian and Southeast Asian prehistory using three of her papers as case studies. These include ‘Hook, line and dilly bag’, her study of the New South Wales shell midden, Bass Point; ‘Hunters in the highlands’, in which she examines the role of women’s technology and subsistence choices in enabling exploitation of high altitude regions; and ‘Hoabinhian and non-Hoabinhian’, in which she reviews the geographic and locational distribution of stone artefacts of Hoabinhian type within Australia and Southeast Asia and posits that they may be women’s multipurpose tools. The use of ethnohistory and ethnographic analogy is identified as playing a central role in Bowdler’s interpretations of gender roles and gender identity in the prehistoric record. The ethnohistoric record pertaining to Indigenous women’s hunting, particularly of marine mammals, is also discussed and used to underpin an explanatory model for the location and patterning of faunal remains in the Tasmanian midden, the Stockyard Site.

Talon cusp in a deciduous lateral incisor from prehistoric Southeast Asia

AbstractThis paper describes a rare case of talon cusp in an infant from prehistoric Southeast Asia and represents the earliest case of talon cusp recorded. In addition to talon cusp, other aspects of its morphology may indicate a possible double tooth. This case is interpreted in the context of clinical and bioarchaeological research on this dental trait. Issues pertaining to the recognition of talon cusp, including clinical terminology used for this anomaly and the accuracy of prevalence data, are also discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.