munities in northeastern Thailand today, the dead are cre-
mated in accord with Buddhist custom, but the practice of
burning personal belongings of the deceased at the same time
perpetuates a pre-Buddhist tradition.
In a Neolithic burial site in western Thailand, the grave
of an old man was found to contain a perforated stone disk
and an antler with the tines sawed off. Per So⁄rensen, the ar-
chaeologist who excavated the site, believes these items may
represent the headdress of a shaman; if so, they would be the
earliest evidence of shamanism in mainland Southeast Asia.
Shamanism must have an ancient pedigree in the region be-
cause it is found among most tribal peoples. Among the most
intriguing Neolithic burial sites are ones in central Laos
where large stone jars were found containing cremated
human remains. This discovery suggests either that crema-
tion predates Indian influence in Southeast Asia or that the
jars were used long after they had originally been constructed
as depositories of remains by peoples who had adopted the
Buddhist practice of cremation.
Sites mainly in northern Vietnam and southern China
dating to the first millennium BCE contain bronze drums as-
sociated with assemblages termed Dong-Son after a site in
northern Vietnam. Dong-Son-type drums were later distrib-
uted widely not only in mainland Southeast Asia but in the
islands of the region as well, although manufacture of the
drums apparently continued to be restricted to a rather small
area in northern mainland Southeast Asia. In more recent
times, drums have been used by tribal peoples such as the
Karen in funerary rites, and some archaeologists believe that
the drums were always associated with death customs. Boat
designs found on some of the Neolithic drums have been in-
terpreted as being symbols of the means whereby souls of the
dead were conveyed to the afterworld. The soul-boat image
is found in a number of Southeast Asian cultures today, and
a prehistoric notion may have persisted also in transformed
form in the Buddhist symbol of the boat that conveys the
saved across the sea of sam:sa ̄ra to nibba ̄na (Skt., nirva ̄n:a).
The designs on the drums, including concentric circles,
frogs, birds, snakes or dragons, human figures in headdresses,
buildings, and in some southern Chinese drums miniature
scenes of rituals, have been variously interpreted. Some un-
derstand these as indicating a type of shamanism in which
the drum played a part; others have seen them as having to-
temic significance. It is quite probable that at least some
drum designs encode a dualistic cosmology, symbolized in
part by an opposition between birds and snakes/dragons. Of
particular interest are the images of buildings on piles, which
may probably be regarded as a type of ritual hall or perhaps
a men’s house, and which are clearly related both to those
found in many tribal communities today and to the dinh, the
communal ritual hall of the Vietnamese.
There was never a uniform Dongsonian culture in
northern mainland Southeast Asia. Peoples of the region in
late prehistoric times were often isolated from each other by
the numerous ranges of hills and must have developed dis-
tinctive religious traditions. Even though drums were widely
traded throughout the region, they were most certainly put
to different ritual purposes by different peoples.
An older generation of scholars, best represented by
Robert Heine-Geldern, posited an underlying unity of pre-
historic Southeast Asian religions that stemmed from the dif-
fusion of a cultural complex from a single European source.
While there were certainly contacts among peoples widely
separated in Southeast Asia in prehistoric times, and while
these contacts resulted in the diffusion of some practices and
beliefs, most basic similarities must be understood to reflect
the ordering of similar experiences (for example, those relat-
ed to death, human fertility, cultivation of rice) that follow
universal modes of human thought.
Drawing on later historical data as well as ethnographic
analogy, Paul Mus, a distinguished student of Southeast
Asian civilization argued that the autochthonous religions of
protohistoric Southeast Asia coalesced around cults he
termed “cadastral.” Such cults were organized around images
drawn from the local worlds of everyday experience. Spirits,
such as the nats of various Tibeto-Burman peoples or the ph ̄ı
of the Tai, populated these worlds. Humans were able to act
in their worlds because they had “vital spirits,” often con-
ceived of as multiple, as with the Vietnamese hon, Khmer
praluDn, or Tai khwan. These vital spirits, which only in some
cases constituted souls that gained immortal states after
death, could leave the body for periods of time, but unless
called back and secured—a practice widely seen among many
peoples in Southeast Asia—the person would weaken and
die.
These cadastral cults constituted the religions of agricul-
tural peoples who had long since made rice their staple, al-
though some cultivated it by swidden or slash-and-burn
methods and others cultivated by irrigation. Rice also was be-
lieved to possess a vital spirit. Even today, peoples as diverse
as the Chin in Burma, Lawa in northern Thailand, Lao in
Laos, Jarai in southern Vietnam, and Khmer in Cambodia
all perform rites after the harvest to call the spirit of the rice
to ensure that it will provide essential nourishment when
consumed. Some peoples also believe that other beings—
especially the water buffalo used for plowing in wet-rice
communities and elephants used for war and heavy labor—
also have vital spirits.
The cosmologies of protohistoric Southeast Asian farm-
ers, like those of primitive peoples throughout the world,
were structured around fundamental oppositions. In South-
east Asia, the oscillation between the rainy rice-growing sea-
son and the dry fallow season found expression in such reli-
gious imagery. The fertility of the rainy season is widely
associated with a female deity, the “rice mother,” although
a male image, that of the na ̄ga, or dragon, and sometimes a
crocodile, is also found in many traditions. In some cases—
such as among the Cham, as attested by seventh-century CE
inscriptions—the female deity is a na ̄g ̄ı. The dry season finds
expression in images of male creator gods associated with the8642 SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: MAINLAND CULTURES