SECTION 1:1

PREHISTORY AND HINDUIZATION

by Hugh M. Lewis

Southeast Asia has been an area of relatively continuous human occupation for over a million years. The Southeast Asian peninsula has long been a migratory crossroads and meeting ground for many different human races. Evidence of earliest human beings in the form of tool assemblages bear a distinctive cultural boundary between those early peoples of East Asia and those further west in West Asia, Africa and Europe. Symmetrical, bi-facially flaked hand-axes of the western Acheulian assemblages and mysterious hand-adzes of the Chopper-Chopping assemblages of the east are the primary representatives of possibly two distinct cultural traditions which may have developed in relative isolation from one another.

Another important feature of the earliest Southeast Asian occupation sites is the earliest evidence of the "controlled use of fire". "The social ramifications of the hearth are stunning…the hearth may well have been one of the most important socializing factors in human evolution." (Kennedy 1980) Conjecture suggests that these earliest human beings pursued "broadly based subsistence activities", living in "temporary structures" or in caves, systematically exploiting large herds of animals through group-hunting strategies which enabled the support of the development of larger, less migrant, groupings of human populations.

Later paleo-anthropological evidence suggests any number of possible "evolutionary sequences" or migration patterns, depending upon the author. The earliest (41,500 1,000 BP) "Modern Homo Sapiens sapiens" is a "very delicately built female" that " resembled some modern Southeast Asians" and who hailed from Niah Caves on Borneo. Imagination can find any number of "racial" associations in Southeast Asians. Fossil remains found in Vietnam "have been referred, at one time or another, to almost every racial type except that which forms the bulk of the population of Southeast Asia today." (Burling 1965) The modern population of this region is truly a potpourri of many migrations of many different peoples. The best description is the shortest and sweetest—people simply moved around from time to time and through the ages mixed it up a lot. Whoever came first, second, third and so on (and whoever wins the "race"), the important consideration for prehistoric process is cultural, and not racial, heritage. If there is any real continuity between the remotest prehistoric past and the modern present it must only be found in human cultural development, and not on all the possible biological permutations and recombination among continually diverging and converging gene pools.

More valuable evidence is archaeological. What is evident in this record is continuous, almost direct sequences of cultural development of human civilization, from the remotest "anthropoids" to historical beginnings, in the northern highlands of Vietnam, that may have been the scene of the independent genesis of an agricultural "revolution" as early as 15,000 BP, and of the rise of one of the earliest human civilizations in the world. A botanical age-area principle has been employed to trace the origins of the Asian cultivated species of rice O. sativa to the mountain ranges of northern Southeast Asia between 15,000 and 10,000 BP. The Crystallitic period is the first recognizable phase of this prehistoric process of civilization, during which distinctive local cultures began to crystallize in Southeast Asia, and this is associated with the Hoa Binhian culture sequence, that may have achieved the transformation to horticulture in the highlands, domestication of plants and animals like the chicken, pig and the dog, as well as the independent invention of pottery. These earliest highland sites are almost always situated in limestone caves near small streams. There occurred then an Extensionistic phase of a major migration trend from the mountain slopes onto the adjacent piedmont, a gradual fanning out process that spread the associated Bac Son civilization throughout Southeast Asia and even into the Pacific. Bac Sonian cultural sequences are evident in sites scattered throughout Southeast Asia, Southern China, Eastern India and even in some of the Pacific islands. Evidence associated with these sites suggest "rudimentary agricultural development" and rather extensive trade networks--the gradual movement to lower elevations created enough of an environmental difference to lead to a transition in ecological cultural patterning. This culture sequence blends smoothly into the Phung Nguyen culture sequence which are located further downstream, reflecting a gradual transition from small middle-country sites almost always upstream of tributaries of main river courses, which were only a hectare in area with no more than a few hundred inhabitants, with broadcasting rizicultural adaptation, to gradual aggregations of hamlets and clans into larger villages with "communal social arrangements" to settlement sites which covered "tens of thousands of square meters and accomodated thousands of inhabitants." (Solheim, April 1972; Higham, April 1984)

These later "Phung-Nguyen" sites feature the independent development of Bronze Metallurgy and the practice of tidal rice cultivation upon the flooded river plains. Agricultural development, population increase, and the organization and mobilization of social elements, based upon Bronze Metallurgy, with Bronze drums, arrow heads, bronze plow shares, and the bronze pedi-form axe associated with the centralization of authority. This cultural sequence developed into the Dong Son culture complex and civilization, the culmination of this prehistoric process of the development of indigenous civilization before conquest by the Chinese. Dong Son civilization is located downstream and peripheral to the main focus of Phung Nguyen sites, featuring a strong economic base upon which rose a feudalistic system of hierarchical chieftains, a sophisticated exception to the contemporaneous communalistic tribal societies predominating upon the Southeast Asian mainland.

The further downstream this early culture sequence spread, the more culture-contact resulted in a kind of cross stimulus-diffusion of early civilizations. Linguistic evidence points to the cultural diversity of the mainland—depending upon the linguist there may be anywhere between five and nine major language families upon the mainland. Most enigmatic is the Mon-Khmer family, the oldest, autochthonous and most widely dispersed and fragmented family—sustained in small isolated highland pockets. The age-area principle suggests a central area of diffusion and origin in the northern highlands, which corroborates well with the rise of Hoa Binhian-Bac Sonian-Phung Nguyen-Dong Sonian cultural sequences. The isolated, fragmented scattering into isolated areas suggests earlier possibly continuous and even distribution throughout the mainland—periodically shattered by the intrusion of other language families. This linguistic pattern of distribution suggests not a pattern of mass migration, but rather of many movements of small influential groups, possibly a princely court and retainers in exile, establishing per force cultural preeminence over another area. This movement of many small groups in many directions is especially apparent upon the alluvial flood plains of the lowland Riverine regions where accessibility of culture-contact led a homogenizing convergence of linguistic and cultural differences. Political expediency of local peoples shifting their language affiliation in defiance of stability or historic unity could well explain the rest. Vietnamese-Mong, or Viet-muong are cousins associated with the Mon-Khmer family, a little subfamily" whose greatest dialectical variation points to an origin in the highlands of North Vietnam.

Folkloric and legendary evidence corroborates well with this patterning of archaeological and linguistic evidence. The legendary Hung kingdom known as Van-lang is traced to the heartland of the Phung Nguyen Culture complex. Dong Son civilization is associated with the legendary Lac Lords whose hereditary titles of Quan Lang conferred possession of Lac-fields based upon tidal irrigation—Lac may mean ditch, canal or waterway. The myth of King An Duong recapitulates the linguistic pattern of small scale princely diffusion of languages. The origin mythology of Lac Long Quan, the dragon lord who came from the sea, and of Au Co, the fairy princess from the mountains, reveals a fundamental highland/lowland, mountain/water antagonism that is a recurrent theme in Southeast Asian mythology and which may be indicative of a general pattern of culture-contact. This lowland adaptation goes back to Quynh Van cultural sequences, contemporaneous with the Bac-Sonian sequences of the extensionistic phase that features a kitchen-midden coastal –riverine adaptation to fishing. This adaptation is found all along the coast south and north as far as China and Japan, diffusing from Southeast Asia and suggesting conversion to agriculture would lead to movements inland, particularly along the rivers. (Fairservice 1959) Carl Sauer proposed a theory of the origin of agriculture with a cradle area along the Southeast Asian coasts associated with fishing and a kind of planting of roots, stems or tubers, of the cultigens of the Yam-Taro-Sago complex, giving rise to settlements of concentrations of people, and thus civilization.

Hinduization of farther India had no historic beginning, being a trickle of sea faring merchants from time immemorial who built early trading settlements on top of ancient Neolithic sites, gradually developing into a major stream of culture-contact eventuating in the "founding of Indian kingdoms practicing the arts, customs and religions of India, and using Sanskrit as their sacred language." (Coedes 1968) Characterized as stimulus diffusion this acculturative contact between South and Southeast Asian civilizations may have germinated the early Dong Son flowering. The model of the process of Hinduization is of a small cultural sub-grouping of a handful of merchant vessels, perhaps carrying Brahmanic priests or scholars, or passing themselves off as of elite caste status, mixing with and influencing the ruling elite of the local areas, adopting the language and introducing their superior civilization, and especially marrying daughters of well places and powerful leaders, who in turn became the best propaganda agents for the promulgation of Indian civilization. Inheriting land or titles of authority, an Indian or Indianized chief then assembled local peoples into an organization of state:

"Often this organization was accompanied by the establishment, on a natural or artificial mountain, of the cult of an Indian divinity intimately associated with the royal person and symbolizing the unity of the kingdom....an example which illustrates the relative parts played by Indian and native elements in the formation of the ancient Indochinese civilizations and the manner in which these two elements interacted." (Coedes 1968:26-27)

There are enough parallels between this early Hinduization process and Vietnamese Origin mythology to suggest that the original culture hero, Lac Long Quan, who "came from the sea," may have been an early Indian merchant. The legend of One Night Marsh, tells of a Hung princess who met a naked man Chu Dong Tu while exploring the delta of the Red River. They married and established a kingdom "near the sea in a palace filled with the luxury wares of sea-borne merchants." Chu was an ethnic denomination by which early Chinese referred to Indian people.

In any case Hinduization was by and large a fairly peaceful and constructive process of cultural fusion and integration unscarred by military conquest or colonial exploitation. "Far from being destroyed by the conquerors, the native peoples of Southeast Asia found in Indian society, transplanted and modified, a framework within which their own society could be integrated and developed." (Coedes 1968: 38)

In contrast, Sinization proceeded by military conquest and administrative annexation. While "Indianization spread to the limits of merchant’s commercial navigation," Sinization never managed to extend Chinese civilization beyond the boundaries of its imperial conquest. While Indian colonizers had only ties of tradition Chinese ties were of political dependency. While Chinese governors administered Chinese commandaries, Indianized kingdoms were governed by "independent sovereigns of native origin or of mixed blood, advised by Indian or Indianized counselors whose activity was chiefly cultural…" (Coedes 1968)