Chapter 10 Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia 379an innovative region where important advances in agriculture, metalwork, and
pottery manufacture were made—and sent north and west. And in the early
Indianized states, an older view that imagined intrepid Indians—traders, war-
riors, Brahmans, or monks—carrying their culture into Southeast Asia is being
replaced by a view that Southeast Asians themselves actively sought out Indian
ideas and constructed their states on an idealized model of Indian kingship.
The Prehistoric Period 2500–150 B.C.E.
One fact to keep in mind is that Southeast Asia in the prehistoric period
included southern China. As the prehistory of East and Southeast Asia unfolds
with the work of archaeologists, there is a tendency for modern nationalist
interests to be rooting for all the best and earliest discoveries to come either
from China or from mainland Southeast Asia. But these borders were not rele-
vant during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. The Han Chinese did not
begin to incorporate the region south of the Yangzi until the first millennium
B.C.E., that is, after the prehistoric period we are considering here (Bellwood
1992). In cultural and linguistic terms, a single integral region stretched from
south of the Yangzi to the South China Sea, including Tai, Tibeto-Burman,
Miao-Yao, and Austroasiatic groups that still inhabit both sides of the current
border. It was, according to Peter Bellwood, in southern China that Neolithic
technology—food cultivating, pottery making—developed, and this successful
new adaptation fueled the population growth and expansion southward and
into the islands of Southeast Asia via sea routes, most significantly the route
from Taiwan to the Philippines and into Indonesia, which carried the Austro-
nesian languages into their vast diaspora (see chapter 2).
The cultures of prehistoric Southeast Asia are known to us only through
archaeological sources, where the word “culture” has its own meaning, both
more and less precise than when the same word is used by historians or cul-
tural anthropologists. A “culture” to archaeologists means the assemblage of
objects and evidence left behind in sites, always a pathetically scant sample of
all that the “culture” (historian/cultural anthropology sense) had once been.
Archaeologists are trained to carefully examine these assemblages in their site
contexts, compare them with assemblages from other sites, near and far, and
make cautious but informed inferences about the actual culture that once
thrived in that region.
One fact is clear about Southeast Asian prehistoric cultures: water was no
barrier to communication. Straits and seas did not isolate folk into so many
discrete, unique, and insulated societies; rather, from 40,000 B.P. forward, large
numbers of Southeast Asians traversed vast stretches of water so that most cul-
tures (archaeologists’ sense) span waterways, linking, for example, Taiwan-
Philippines-Timor, or Malay Peninsula-Sumatra-Borneo, or even Borneo-New
Guinea-Fiji.
The earliest of these across-the-seas dispersals took Australo-Melanesians
into Australia and New Guinea around 40,000 B.P. By 9600 B.P., another broad