The Orthodox Conservatism of Conventional Archaeology The "Waterways" Hypothesis The Southeast Asian Maritime Context The Analytical Framework Phase I--Early Prehistoric Phase II--Late Prehistoric (12,000-1,000 BC) Phase III-- Early Protohistoric Period (1,500-1 BC) Phase IV--Late Protohistoric-Early Historic Period (1 AD-1500 AD) Rethinking Culture and Civilization as Historical Process

Scientifically conservative continental archaeologists have shied away from synthetic reconstructions of the past, especially those focusing upon human maritime and waterway adaptations. The cumulative consequences of these tendencies toward conservatism are the implicit undervaluing in inductive, ground-up reconstructions as well as of the potential human capacity for civilization.

Besides the chronic underestimation of the human capacity for culture implicit in such conservatism, there is also an a-theoretical rejection of counter-factuality as a heuristic means of hypothetical reconstruction of the past.

Strictly speaking, counterfactual reconstruction of prior events may be logically impossible, but may still be historically plausible. The insufficiency of evidence alone, especially if this insufficiency is due primarily to a lack of research or evidence in an area, is not enough to reject competing alternative hypothesis, as long as the hypothesis: a) can reasonably account for available data; b) provides reasonable alternative conclusions; c) is not explicitly contradicted by any specific counter-evidence.

The conservatism of conventional archaeology is expressed in several ways: 1) its "nothing but" analytical orientation; 2) its "data-boundness;" 3) its "as late as" evidentiary caution; 4) its spatial "locationalist" and "localistic" bias; 5) its "Great Tradition/little tradition" dichotomization; 6) its lumping/splitting tendencies in categorical constructions; and, finally, 7) its exclusive "territoriality."

The cumulative consequences of these tendencies are its implicit undervaluing of the potential human capacity for civilization in its inductive, "ground-up" reconstructions and the professional devaluation of the logical role of counter-factuality in hypothesis construction. It is argued that the orthodox rage of "scientific" consensus in the professional identification of the field systematically precludes the historical role of Archaeology as a heterodox "humanity."

1) Jaquetta Hawkes delivered a critique of the encroachment of scientific reductionism in archaeology in her 1971 John Danz Lecture "Nothing But or Something More," based upon her sense of distrust in the systematic narrowing of the rational "beyond its true meaning of the reasonable until it excludes subjective experience, a great part of what it means to be a human person..." (p 3). The analytical emphasis of such reductionism represents the single minded extension of a methodology of the physical sciences to more humanly problematic enterprises of anthropology until it becomes a worldview--a "totalitarian ideology," characterized by the reduction of the whole as "nothing but" the sum of its parts. It is a reduction to basics in which humankind is nothing but a complex bio-chemical mechanism, and a reduction to origins in which, if we prefer, "there is nothing in man which was not first in the amoeba." (p. 6)

Against this urge to "nothing but" reductionism, Hawkes poses the "something more" of a "universal reality of hierarchy" in which multiple levels of organization that are "two-faced" and that are structured both from below by its component elements and above by its relationships with higher levels of integration, and from which new properties emerge at each level not present at lower ones. Furthermore, such universality of hierarchy can be demonstrated experimentally as well as theoretically.

Her critique of reductionism, when applied to "analytical archaeology" that restricts itself to graphs, statics and histograms, is the attempt to define humankind as nothing but technical, material and economic--as next to a "mosquito" in evolutionary terms and without the free will or consciousness which has played such a determining role in history. Left out is the sense of the "human will to meaning" and value that has been such a part of the human creation of civilization.

Hawkes summarizes a trait list of shared characteristics of the independent pristine civilizations of the old and the new worlds, noting that while the Mesoamerican civilizations had developed a ball game with score keeping, mathematics and a calendar, they had not developed technological features of a wheel, an arch or a metallurgy. These are that a materialist hypothesis would logically lead one to suspect as being the point of convergence between civilizations. (ibid.: pg. 25)

2) "Data-boundness" is a general bias of attitude and orientation that I have noted especially among many archaeologists and physical anthropologists whose primary researches are concerned with the minutiae of analysis of bones, teeth, and, in the case of archaeologists, chipped stones and pot sherds. It is an attitude of near exclusive preoccupation with the analysis of the artifact or the physical specimen rather than with the conjecture of the history which these material items may represent. There is an atheoretical, method bound fear of counterfactual conjecture and restrictiveness of interpretation--focus often becomes concentrated on the development of componential analysis aimed at establishing the internal/external provenience and "validity" of the "objet d'homme."

The consequences is that when and if they do generalize, they end up taking a grand leap of faith and falling off into a chasm--they are not very good at doing what they have little practice with. There is a consequence of theoretical naivete' and historical blindness in the superimposition of the researcher's own values and preconceptions upon the "origin" story of the data--the classic case is the interpretation of all "Venus figurines" as cult fetishes and fertility symbols with "pendulous breasts," steatophygic buttocks and pronounced labia. (S. M. Nelson, "Diversity of the Upper Paleolithic 'Venus' Figurines and Archaeological Mythology." in Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropology Association 1990 pg. 11-22)

There is a predisposition to view the hidden history behind the material data with the same general sense of material objectivity as is embodied in the data itself. History is firmly rooted to the ground. Perhaps this kind of theoretical caution is safe (especially when it comes to setting confidence limits), perhaps too safe, and therefore perhaps it is also inevitable and unavoidable.

When we hold an ancient flint chopper or scraper in our hands, we can conjecture how its maker may have held and used it. We can turn it over in our hands to find the most suitable grip and the clearest cutting edge. We might even go so far as to try to make one ourselves, or to attempt to use it in various tasks--and if we did this enough we might even become good at it and develop a "feel" for the object that we would not gain through the microscope.

3) "As late as" evidentiary caution, versus "at least by" evidentiary conjecture, has an understandable reason in archaeological interpretation. The peopling of North America can only be as old as the oldest fossils yet discovered, the stratigraphic level of a site can only be as early as the latest artifact found at that level, unless it is known to have percolated from a higher or lower provenience.

From a scientific standpoint this is supremely sensible. We are wed to an empiricist tradition which holds that an unseen, unsounded tree fallen in the forest could not have fallen. It is also extremely safe--let someone else stick their professional neck out on the block to build mansions on ground that is not there. Ever since Piltdown and Lysenko, the scientific community loves to "falsify" and chastise.

The problem with this general attitude and approach is that it is extremely conservative and entangled in a long tradition which wishes to confer upon humankind only the most shallow and recent history possible--perhaps no later than the flood. (Margaret T. Hodgen Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1964) The general trend of evidence has been to push in unprecedented fashion our sequences and reconstructed trees and dates back further and deeper into the past than anyone would have been daring to admit. It was thought incredible that humankind could have an origin of several hundred thousand, or even a million years, but when Lucy was found to have a tentative history of 3.5 to 4 million years, it all seemed astonishing. Even in the archaeological and paleological record, things eventually fall into place, and dates, sequences and trees eventually stabilize--at least enough to permit more confidence and consensus of reconstruction, or at least until something unexpected is dug up.

"At least by" daring should not be so much a mark of professional incompetence, as it should be a measure of the willingness to search beyond what exists to see that even the artifacts themselves must have had precedents and a history other than what we ascribe to them. The human capacity for culture that led to the creation of the artifact must have been in place and preceded its creation and humankind making its own history must have been more of a continuous process than a stratigraphy.

4) The spatial "locationist" bias is the tendency to see cultural processes of the past as self-contained groupings, segregates, as units or as little culture gardens that can be clearly demarcated on a map. This bias tends to under emphasize the importance of human movement, migration, trans-cultural communication and transmission and of regions of great cultural overlap, interaction and multiple diffusion.

The consequence of this kind of bias inherited from the gemeinschaft culture area approach is the implicit tendency to see groups as locally rooted and embedded in time, as fossilized artifacts standing for distinctive peoples, cultures, phases and horizons whose boundaries are clearly marked and exclusive. (Jacob Pandian The Other in Us: An Essay Concerning the Function of Anthropology in the Western Intellectual Tradition [unpublished manuscript] 1982 )

Time is implicitly frozen in this view of the past as a static, predictable and linear measure of absolute distance from the present--historical and cultural distance is directly translatable into geographical distance. (Johannes Fabian Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object 1983)

We can imagine the original owner of this skull, standing here in this place, ten thousand years ago when this place was not a hole but a hill, surveying the boundaries of his property--the same land of his ancestors and of his progeny. History has significance because it is continuously and contiguously linked with the here and the now.

This tendency to isolate "segregates" in time and space on the historical map of the world overlooks both the likelihood that the greater part of Human prehistory must have been marked as much by human movement and people getting around and going places and mixing it all up as by the archaeological stasis implied by stratigraphic provenience, and by the fact that the earth itself, and everything on it, has had its own natural history.

We have no good idea how far "primitive man" must have traveled or the distances spanned during seasonal perigrinations or over a brief life-span of survival, but there seems to be little sound reason for presupposing that the more ancient the people, the more local and homebound their travels and orientation.

5) The "Great Tradition/little tradition" dichotomy is perhaps rooted in the secret desire to discover the last lost pristine civilization of the world, buried somewhere in the vast emptiness of a desert or underneath a tropical forest canopy or in some hidden mountain valley.

We end up with a stratified pyramid of sites hieratically ranked from High to low and from Grand to little. The archaeologist is as local a figure as the site s/he can claim. We tend to see in the stratigraphy the same sense of site stratification--rather than a continuum of process and change, there is a clear spectrum of categories and prototypes ranging between the poles of Grand and local.

Of course, ancient monuments and high art are always crowd pleasers while pot shards and fragments of bone or stone are at best boring museum pieces, though the latter type of artifact may in fact be more informative about a bygone age than the former.

What can we really say about this "Great Divide" except to see in it the romantic reflection of our own "Core-periphery" prejudices and selective perception, and a tendency to see in the "primitive mind" of the makers of the latter types of artifacts the cultural and civilizational deficit of the "Genius" of the makers of the former type. If this is true, then we must conclude that the original artists of the Lascaux caves constitute the first clear evidence of pristine human civilization that antedates state-development in all other regions by some ten millenium.

6) "Lumping/Splitting" tendencies are perhaps as much the consequence of a spotty and incomplete record, in which the number and size of gaps far outweigh amount of available evidence, as it is our own categorical predisposition to label everything we find. Splitting comes from the tendency to recognize in every newly discovered artifact a new type, a new category, a new species, rather than merely a variant of previously known groups. Thus we get a proliferation of periods and peoples in direct proportion to the number of discoveries and discoverers. Lumping is the reverse tendency to reduce all variation down to a single common theme--to have one basic archetype, one type-site for all cases unearthed.

The question underlying these tendencies is how much variation of a small sub-sample is enough to be theoretically predictive or historically significant of the true population. Our small sub-sample may be skewed, or else the original population may have been skewed in ways not evident in our sample. What lumping and splitting does indicate is a preoccupation with the relations between the data rather than with the relations between the data and the gaps in the record. Any gap, of whatever size, can become the basis for splitting the sample into two or more sub-samples, or else it can become the basis for filling in between two samples to create a union, for lumping differences under a single category.

The gap is either absolute and unbridgeable, or else nonexistent and easily spanned by the imagination. Either way, we tend to systematically exclude the unknown and perhaps the unknowable as well, from our analysis of what is known. This represents a somewhat anal preoccupation with boundaries and a fear of the unknown as something uncertain, to be covered over or cast out.

Lack of evidence should not be counted as counter evidence but as space available for plausible hypothetical counterfactuals.

7) Territoriality is perhaps directly proportional to ego--my site, my area, my people, my specialty, my provenience, my phase, my horizon. We seek to monopolize and drive out competition such that our authority can be seen as the final authority. The borders we mark out around the material manifestations of our work the boundaries of our own interest, character, and professional investment. We possess the ideas, the knowledge, the data, the history, the authority, as these things possess us. We must defend them at all cost from any threat that looms upon our horizon. In so doing we seek consensus that comes from perfect order and stability, and drive out all dissonance and difference. A period in history, a place in time, a people becomes our own private preserve.

Perhaps such territoriality is rooted in a need for control, which itself may be rooted in deeper needs and insecurities. Such control manifests itself in two kinds of way--the need to control the site, the type, the data, the artifact, the conclusion, for the sake of "science" and the need for political control over the information, the understanding, the resources of that part of the profession.

The combination of these kinds of biases is symptomatic of a conservatism in archaeological interpretation. Besides the chronic underestimation of the human capacity for culture that is implicit in such conservatism, there is also an a-theoretical rejection of counter factuality as a heuristic means of hypothetical reconstruction of the past.

A model of rational parsimony of explanation is not necessarily the most reasonable or realistic rationale for representing the phenomenal complexity of human historical patterning--we cannot systematically reduce these complexities to the level of first principles or component parts without a loss of fidelity to the "facts" in place.

Furthermore, general confusion exists between the deterministic strength of historical cause-effect relations and the inference strength of logical conditionality, and underlies the consistent over-rating of material datum and the under-rating of interpretive counter factuality. Modus tollens type fallacy that cannot strictly apply in logical argument--arguing from the consequent to the antecedent--may apply in a known historical relationship. The difference in this case is between strictly deductive inference; and abductive and inductive methods of inference;. The latter types of reasoning are not strictly provable from a logical standpoint, but they are useful ways of deriving inferences when dealing with causal determination (i.e. history).

In inductive inference in which generalization is based upon a limited sub-sample, the conclusion may be falsified by a single contradictory case. In abductive logic, unlike deduction, there may be more than one conflicting inference derived from the consequent, though only one conclusion may actually be true. (James L. Noyes, Artificial Intelligence with Common Lisp: Fundamentals of Symbolic and Numeric Processing 1993: pgs. 296-303.)

Strictly speaking, counterfactual reconstruction of prior events may be logically impossible, but may still be historically plausible. The insufficiency of evidence alone, especially if this insufficiency is due primarily to a lack of research or evidence in an area, is not enough to reject competing alternative hypothesis-- as long as the hypothesis: a) can reasonably account for available data; b) provides reasonable alternative conclusions; c) is not explicitly contradicted by any specific counter-evidence. (Giles Fauconnier, Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, 1985: pgs.81-142.)

An alternative "waterways" hypothesis is proffered regarding the culture ecological role of human adaptation to marine environments as a "primary mover" and possible interregional catalyst to the systemic development of early human civilization. This hypothesis represents a general extension and revision to Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis" as a prime mover in early despotic states, to encompass the entire range of human relationships to water and its resources as a primary environmental constraint in the multivariate "systemic circumscription" of early civilization.

The paucity of evidence due to the weathering and poor preservation effects of exposure to water, the shifting of coastlines and river-courses, the rising and falling of water levels, and alluvial flooding, have precluded the formulation of any major hypothesis regarding the role of human lacustrian, riverine and marine adaptations in the development of early civilizations.

An ethnohistorical reconstruction of human marine adaptations must take into account the vital role which rivers, lakes, coast-lines and seas may have long played in interregional cultural integration as channels of communication, control, and transmission. Such maritime reconstruction must also take into account possible periods and processes of three analytical phases--prehistoric, proto-historic and historic, as well as the interregional "trans-local" character of the processes of contact, acculturation, diffusion, migration and stimulus generation underlying the development of human civilization.

The adaptation to exploitation of aquatic resources may have provided an important resource base in the promotion of population growth and social-environmental circumscription stimulating early human social formation, development and migration. Fishing-Farming cultures have been closely associated in the archaeological record with the beginnings of agricultural development. (Carl O. Sauer Seeds, Spades, Hearths & Herds: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press 1952: pgs.24-5.)

Bodies of water may have long provided important barriers which may have served as "thresholds of integration" in the early development of human civilization--overcoming the barrier presented by water required optimal levels of social organization and technological sophistication, while mastery of the waterways has always conferred a tremendous power and strategic advantage.

The model of the "waterways" hypothesis; is a systemic one in which the relative availability and control of water is both a "resonance dampening" and a "resonance amplification" mechanism in the development of human social organization and integration. (Kent Flannery "The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations" in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics" 3, 1972: pgs. 399-426, and "Archaeological Systems Theory and Early Mesoamerica" in Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas Washington D. C.: 1971: pgs. 67-87.)

The consequence is that the control of water has been a primary mover in the development of human civilization. This model may be summed up by the following set of hypothetical postulates. It has served both as a "first-order" resonance dampening mechanism (A) of social-environmental circumscription and as a "second-order" resonance amplification mechanism (B) leading to the systemic, interregional organization:

A. Waterways have provided an important set of factors contributing to the systemic circumscription of local and regional human populations.

I. Periods of Glaciation and rising/falling sea levels and accompanying climactic fluctuations may have created the early demographic/environmental circumscription which lead to the evolution of modern humans and their cultural complex.

a. Advancing and retreating coastlines may have had a consequence of facilitating adaptive radiation and then divergent isolation--leading to a "founder effect".

b. Rising water levels and advancing glaciers may have induced intense periods of environmental/social circumscription in some areas, resulting in rapid selection.

II. Water, its availability or scarcity, has always served as a critical constraining factor in human social patterning.

a. Control of water as a critical resource, as an unpredictable menace, and as a strategic advantage, has long been a primary preoccupation of and impetus for human social organization.

1. Natural precipitation has always been an uncertain and undependable source of water.

2. The collection of a stable supply of fresh water, in either natural or artificial reservoirs, has long been a primary social preoccupation of human groups.

3. The earliest vessels served the function of containing water.

b. Large bodies of water and concourses have provided an important, relatively stable protein resource pool upon which large and healthy human populations can be supported.

1. Specialized adaptations/technologies/techniques in the cultural ecology of aquatic resource exploitation was an early, and important, extension of the human resource base.

c. The production or abundance of a stable supply of food has always depended upon a predictable and stable supply of water.

1. Assurance a stable, steady supply of water stimulated the development of artificial water control technologies and techniques.

III. Large bodies of water and concourses have long been both obstacles to human movement and communication that have always challenged people to overcome.

a. Overcoming the natural obstacles imposed by large bodies of water and concourses have required a minimal degree of technical invention, cooperative social organization and political integration.

1. Irrigation and flood control projects required the mobilization and coordination of large numbers of people.

2. Shipbuilding, fishing, and trading required craft-role specialization.

b. The challenge of overcoming the obstacles posed by waterways provided a "springboard" for more complex social organization and development.

B. Mastering the challenges presented by the obstacles of waterways conferred important strategic advantages in transportation, communication, command and mobility that allowed groups to extend their range of exploitation and control to encompass a broader spectrum of environments and resources than otherwise possible.

I. Gaining control of waterways made possible trans-local, regional integration and interregional contact and diffusion.

a. Waterways provided a fast and efficient route of transportation and communication.

II. Maintaining control of waterways required the development of secondary social institutions to manage and mobilize people in construction projects, in trade and commerce, and to protect the strategic lines of communication afforded by waterway traffic.

a. Control of piracy became a major preoccupation of many states, providing the basis for interstate cooperation, and for the organization and mobilization of navies to protect the waterways.

III. Development of waterways made possible the growth of a cosmopolitan way of life based upon interregional trade and water-born commerce.

a. There occurred a transformation of cultural adaptations that led to increasing interregional interdependencies upon waterway trade and traffic--in both basic commodities and in sumptuary and symbolic goods and capital.

1. Sociocultural institutions were rapidly modified in adaptation and dependency upon access to non-local resources most readily available by waterborne transportation.

2. There occurred a secondary patterning of competition and conflict that led to a pattern of imperial "rise and fall" development of states, chronic warfare and increasing incorporation of peripheral regions into the nexus of traffic and trade.

IV. Mastering maritime transportation stimulated and facilitated diffusion and intercultural contact, providing:

a. An escape valve for relieving of population and environmental pressures.

b. A maritime "frontier" for early pioneers.

Early periods of glaciation and the accompanying rising and falling of sea levels, accompanying shifting of coastlines and climactic fluctuations may have created the early demographic/environmental circumscription which stimulating development of modern humans and their cultural complex. Advancing and retreating coastlines may have had a consequence of facilitating adaptive radiation and then divergent isolation--leading to a "founder effect". Rising water levels and advancing glaciers may have induced intense periods of environmental/social circumscription in some areas, resulting in rapid selection.

Water, its availability or scarcity, has always served as a critical constraining factor in human social patterning. The control of water as a critical resource, as an unpredictable menace, and as a strategic advantage, and the collection of a stable supply of fresh water in natural or artificial reservoirs, has long been a primary preoccupation of and impetus for human social organization. Natural precipitation has always been an uncertain and undependable source of water. The earliest vessels served the function of containing water.

The production or abundance of a stable supply of food has always depended upon a predictable and stable supply of water. Assurance a stable, steady supply of water stimulated the development of artificial water control technologies and techniques.

Large bodies of water and concourses have provided an important, relatively stable protein resource pool upon which large and healthy human populations can be supported. Specialized cultural adaptations, technologies and techniques in the cultural ecology of aquatic resource exploitation was an early, and important, achievement extending the human resource base.

Large bodies of water and concourses have long been obstacles to human movement and communication. Overcoming the natural obstacles imposed by large bodies of water and concourses have required a minimal degree of technical invention, cooperative social organization and political integration, the challenge of overcoming these obstacles posed by waterways providing a springboard for more complex social organization and development. Shipbuilding, fishing, and trading required skill and experience.

Mastering the challenges presented by the obstacles of waterways conferred important strategic advantages in transportation, communication, command and mobility that allowed groups to extend their range of exploitation and control to encompass a broader spectrum of environments and resources than otherwise possible. Gaining control of waterways made possible trans-local, regional integration and interregional contact and diffusion. Waterways provided a fast and efficient route of transportation and communication. Mastering maritime transportation stimulated and facilitated diffusion and intercultural contact, providing an escape valve for relieving of population and environmental pressures and a maritime frontier for early pioneers.

Maintaining control of waterways required the development of secondary social institutions to manage and mobilize people in construction projects, in trade and commerce, and to protect the strategic lines of communication afforded by waterway traffic.

Control of piracy became a major preoccupation of many states, providing the basis for interstate cooperation, and for the organization and mobilization of navies to protect the waterways.

Development of waterways made possible the growth of a cosmopolitan way of life based upon interregional trade and water-born commerce. There occurred a transformation of cultural adaptations that led to increasing interregional interdependencies upon waterway trade and traffic--in both basic commodities and in sumptuary and symbolic goods and capital. Sociocultural institutions were rapidly modified in adaptation and dependency upon access to non-local resources most readily available by water-born transportation.

There occurred a secondary patterning of competition and conflict that led to a pattern of imperial rise and fall development of states, chronic warfare and increasing incorporation of peripheral regions into the nexus of traffic and trade.

The net consequence is that the control of water has been a primary mover in the development of human civilization. It has served both as a "first-order" resonance dampening mechanism (A) of social-environmental circumscription and as (B) a "second-order" resonance amplification mechanism leading to the systemic, interregional organization.

Many regions are candidates for such an hypothesis. For instance: the circum-Mediterranean region including the reaches of the Nile throughout the early history and prehistory of Europe and Western Asia; the North Atlantic during the period of the "Red Paint Peoples" and later during the era of Viking conquest and settlement; the "Sea of Sunrise"/Tigris-Euphrates region in the early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Dilmun; the Gulf of Mexico/Carribbean region during the periods of the pristine MesoAmerican Civilizations; the central role of lakes in the development of many early civilizations--Olmec/Toltec/Aztec, the Bugandan state in Africa; the role of rivers in others --the Indus-system of Harappa, the Red-River in North Vietnam, the Yang-tse in early China; early maritime-riverine-delta "Mandala" civilizations of protohistorical Southeast Asia, the Niger in the early development of African Nok Civilization; the Nile in the case of Egyptian Civilization; the Northeast Coast complex in native North America extending from Alaska down to the coasts of California, the development of riverine cultural complexes throughout Amazon and Orinoco riverine systems, the Missourian-Mississipian Mound-building complex, the transmigration, trade networks and high Island/low Island tributary complexes of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, and the Circum-polar adaptations of the Inuit peoples. Though many early civilizations may not necessarily have developed in such a way, Incan civilization, Aztec Civilization, Southwest Amer-Indian civilization, the very early role of a single ocean in the regional and interregional development of Southeast Asian civilization cannot be ignored.

A few scholars have emphasized the importance of a "maritime" perspective in Southeast Asia--the early work on trade in Southeast Asia by von Leuer deserves recognition for its originality, and the work of E. O. Wolters and his "single ocean" perspective deserves special attention. Donald Emmerson, in his appeal for a Maritime perspective on Southeast Asian civilization, notes the paucity of research in this regard--"The disappearance of the seascapes in the way Westerners view Southeast Asia is more than a curiosity of maps. It is symptomatic of the general invisibility and underestimation of the regions maritime side." (Donald K. Emmerson "The Case for a Maritime Perspective on Southeast Asia" The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies March, 1980 pp. 139-145.) "There are, it seems to me, two subjective impediments to seeing the centripetal role of the seas in Southeast Asia, and both betray the land-mindedness in the observer. The first and most obvious is to think that bodies of water, especially waters as shallow and near land as Southeast Asia's, are obstacles rather than invitations. This misconception still exists....Less generally overcome is a second hindrance: to regard the sea in Southeast Asia as merely a medium for traffic rather than a resource in its own right...these two uses of the sea-- as medium and resource--will not always be compatible." (ibid.; pg. 142)

This maritime perspective of Southeast Asia as a region has been underrepresented in archaeological research, despite evidence that points to the early domestication of rice, agriculture and civilization along coastal perimeters. It is proposed that interregional integration and development via human mastery of surrounding waterways has been a primary impetus behind civilization in this region for a period much deeper in time and to a much greater extent than most pre-historians would generally acknowledge--perhaps as early as 30,000 years BP.

Southeast Asia has long been referred to as a crossroads of interregional trade, migration and acculturative contact between many civilizations of East Asia, the Pacific, South and West Asia, and Europe. Without doubt this region has figured time immemorial in the traffic of certain region specific tropical goods--nutmeg, rhinoceros horn, birds nests, kingfishers, gold, exotic woods, gums and resins. "Trade was a perennial influence in the historical development of Southeast Asia. In association with agricultural and human resources, commercial currents influenced the rise and fall of political units, institutional changes, and the appropriation of alien religious and art forms. Sea-borne commerce traditionally followed fixed by arrival and ending of the semiannual monsoon seasons on both sides of the peninsula. The principal commodities included perfumed woods and resins, gold and precious stones, and spices and other condiments from Southeast Asia itself; silken yarns and fabrics, tea, and porcelains from China; high quality textiles from India; glass items, rugs and tapestries from the Near East; and objects of arts from all areas. The volume of the trade varied with market demands, the perils of piracy and shipwreck, the availability of convenient entre'pot centers, and the degree of political stability prevailing throughout the trading arc extending from India to China. It can nevertheless be assumed that the character of the trade itself, intended as it was for princely and patrician consumption, changed but little from century to century. The transient peddlers, the temporary beach and market bazaars, the more permanent shops and warehouses, the eternal haggling of merchants with each other and with peasant producers, plus the activities of wandering adventurers were the universal and timeless characteristics of port centers. The commercial impact of neither India nor China became historically significant until the second century A.D." (.J. Cady, The Development of Southeast Asian Civilization, 1964:21)

Evidence also points to the suggestion that the patterning of many of its basic exchange networks and interregional contacts may have been as complex in the deeper prehistoric phases as they were in the later proto-historic era. These were relations that have undoubtedly left an indelible mark upon the character of Southeast Asian civilization.

This hypothesis requires an analytical framework within a set of broad, overlapping historical periods. Three phases will be considered: the prehistoric phase from the late paleolithic and neolithic, the proto-historic phase, encompassing the rise of early civilizations until the end of the middle ages, and the fully historic phase beginning with the European "Age of Discovery" and the role of Western colonial imperialism in the rise of the capitalist world system.

Several distinct periods will be briefly considered. The first prehistoric period (Phase I & II) is the long presence of early Hominids in the Southeast Asian Archipelago. The second proto-historic period involves the evidence for an extensive "coastal culture" during the Neolithic throughout Southeast Asia, emerging in the later sub-period with the development of early trade networks and local political integration throughout the region based upon riverine-delta Mandala kingdoms (Phase III & IV). The third Historic Period (Phase V & VI) includes the trade sojourning patterns of Chinese, Indian, Arabian and European merchants and continuing until today.

The beginning of the next phase did not necessarily signal the end of the previous phases, but rather the embedding of processes and patterns one upon the other, such that today in Southeast Asia it is possible to find the presence of living stone age people next door to people who dwell in sky scrapers--easily spanning the full range of historical and cultural diversity.

Generally, the Paleolithic may be divided into several sub-phases. The earliest one is the prehistoric land-bridge phase, up to 45,000 BP, in which population movements of early hominids must have depended for the most part upon the presence of critical land-bridges that allowed the crossing from Continent to island, or island to island or Continent to Continent. Such early land bridges may have existed during glacial periods in which there was a significant drop in global sea levels, the Bering Straits in the early peopling of the Americas, the Sundanese Shelf in the paleolithic peopling of the Indonesian Archipelago, Melanesia and Australasia.

We may speculate that during this formative early period the advance and retreat of glaciers and the corresponding advance and retreat of coastlines and of altering climactic patterns may have been important circumscriptive elements in the emergence of human culture and the evolutionary development of modern Homo saipiens.

A broad and critical transitional phase from the upper-Paleolithic through the Neolithic is hypothesized (45,000-4,000B.C.) during which decisive archaeological evidence for maritime adaptations (fish hooks, harpoon heads, weights, shell middens, and lacustrian habitations and settlements) begins to emerge in increasing complexity and abundance.

This period must have witnessed the increasing frequency of contact and migration of peoples across water-barriers and along water-edges by means of preconstructed boat-float devices--that meant the broader extension of habitation along coasts and previously inaccessible insular regions than previously permitted. This phase culminated in a late-prehistoric phase which witnessed the rise of the first pristine civilizations (4,000-1,000 BC).

In all areas, the proto-historic phases might be referred to as the "classic period" of human maritime migration and expansion--the age of Homer during which even European annals of history and Asian history remained for the most part local, home-bound "intra-regional" histories with but few exceptions. Admiral Grand Eunoch Cheng Ho was sent out to pacify and map the distant regions off the shores of China in the mid-15th Century, during the period that the Portuguese were rounding the cape and several decades before Christopher Columbus. But the exceptions were significant--Herodotus, Tacitus. Marco Polo was an early example of the European Explorer who presaged the later Age of Discovery by several centuries.

This phase witnessed the growing civilizational linkages throughout the world such that few if any significant barriers of communication or transportation existed except perhaps the oceans separating the New World from the Old world, such that no major region of the earth was without significant, complex human civilization. Few areas were during this phase absolutely isolated from outside, ultimately global, or interregional civilizational influences. Practically everywhere on earth a sophisticated riverine-maritime cultural ecological complex of adaptation had taken root. This phase witnessed the peopling of the Pacific, of the Arctic, the migration of Siberian peoples down the coast of the Northwestern and Western North America, the discovery of the New World by the Vikings, and the rise of pristine civilizations upon almost every continent of the world.

The historic phase is better known and well documented, and witnessed the global incorporation of almost all the world's peoples into the world system. The proto-historic and historical phases did not begin everywhere at the same time. What was significantly historical at fairly early periods (1,500-500 BC) in a few regions, like East Asian, Egyptian, Mesopotamia, Mediterranean, showing patterns of dense, precocious civilizational activity, remained largely prehistoric or proto-historic regions in most of the rest of the world. History proper began two thousand years earlier in Europe than it did in the New World, and even a thousand years earlier in the Orient. It is this broad unevenness of the record of historical development across many regions of the world that the phase between the end of the neolithic and the beginning of the "Age of Discovery" is to be construed as protohistorical whatever the region, and that the fully historical phase begins with European maritime exploration and colonization of the nonwestern regions of the world.

At the point of maximal drop in sea levels, there existed no land bridge between Australia and New Guinea and the Island mass then referred to as Wallacea. It is therefore most likely that between 50-30,000 BC people ancestral to the Papuan speakers or to the Australian aborigines had crossed the narrow straits separating Sahul from the mainland by means of some kind of water-borne craft--perhaps primitive "boat-float" devices powered by wind or paddle. The only viable alternative explanation to this would have been that people en mass swam across these straits, though this seems less likely because not every individual would have had the same swimming skills. In any case, the ability to swim across these straits must have meant a previous existence alongside of water and extensive contact and swimming experience in the water.

Forging the 65 km. wide straits on a rough raft or crude boat is the most plausible explanation. Whether this was a well-executed boat design or not, it must have been built well enough to transport a viable community, and probably to have made more than one crossing. If this is the case, then there is no reason not to presume that these people and some of their coastal descendants were using water craft ever since, and that subsequent to this time but still very remote, extensive travel and settlement along coastal and riverine reaches had already occurred.

Though it is unlikely that these early craft would have been seaworthy enough to carry people across wide and uncertain expanses of water, they probably did allow short excursionary movements along coasts and up and down streams under suitable conditions. The only extant research done on early Southeast Asian boats is an article by Pierre-Yves Manguin focusing upon the trading craft of the protohistoric period, from which it surmises the Chinese may have inherited certain features in the later designs of its ocean-going junks. (Pierre-Yves Manguin "The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach" Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Sept., 1980.) He summarizes the early design of these craft: 1. Their large capacity, carrying upwards of 1,000 people and 250-1,000 tons; 2. Their lack of iron in joinery--either pegs or external bindings; 3. A hull consisting of several layers of planks; 4. The use of quarter rudders for navigation; 5. A rigging with multiple masts and sails; 6. A lack of out rigging. (pg. 275-6) I would add to this the possibility of certain unique construction techniques, such as the use of dripping hot-oil and continuous pressure to bend the central hull keel beam at about 3/4-2/3 its length into the appropriate shape described to me by a Vietnamese fisherman.

A very plausible candidate for building material would be bamboo, a vegetable item of culture that was surely already widely used in a number of ways. It is also probable that if they relied on water-bearing craft to transport them in any one direction, they had to have a means of propelling and steering the craft. In shallow waters poles are commonly used. The only other alternatives are by paddling or by wind. Possible early boat designs may have been by wood, bark, hide, clay, rattan or reeds, bamboo. They may have been rather like floats or rafts, or more streamlined. Streamlining yields various prototypical features of boats--maximum length to width, relative flatness to dept of keel in the water, of composite materials or of a single piece, high bow and stern or relative flat profile in the water, single person size or large enough to carry several or many people. People of the early prehistoric were probably playing around with such craft for a long time before a streamlined and prototypical hull design became fully developed, and before a means of locomotion became a standard part of its design. The earliest evidence of boats are hieroglyphic designs of boats at least 6,000 BC. By this time, boat building must have become a stable and common trait of many different cultures throughout the world. Locomotion would have entailed such streamlining, and would have been square sails made of bata material, basketry, skins, and/or rough cut paddles or oars.

At any rate, basic boats and boat-sized trade goods must have quickly become one of the earliest and most widespread characteristics of early prehistoric civilization--perhaps only next to fire in its order of importance. Not only was it a thing that rapidly diffused, but it was a primary vehicle for the diffusion of culture.

How streamlined these boats had become by the time of the recession of the coastline remains impossible to determine, but undoubtedly they would by then have acquired their prototypical hull-like shape, rather than being a raft-like platform, and they would have gained some kind of rudder, keel and sail as a means of stabilizing them in the open seas. By the time the Islands of Indonesia became isolated, humans probably had acquired the capacity for traversing long distances between the islands, and probably did so with great regularity (Maximum rise in sea-level is given as 4,000 BP)

Before this time also, we can speak of the likely integration along the coasts and river accessible interiors via the reliance upon rafts and canoes. Rafts of bamboo can easily be floated down stream, but it would have required a more streamlined design and paddles or poles to maneouver a vessel upstream. And if a canoe with paddles had been developed at some early point for traveling up streams, these vessels would have also been carried down stream and out into the open seas.

The early development of dependable and seaworthy boats would have meant several important things. First, areas separated by a relatively short distance as the crow flies but by an unfordable body of water, would have been subject to increasing contact, and integration.

In many cases traveling a few of miles across a body of water would have been much faster and perhaps less hazardous than traveling along the coast or by an inland route. Secondly, extensive areas of coastline, or of inland regions along river routes and tributaries, that would otherwise have been out of reach and effectively cut off, would have become brought within a widening zone of contact and integration. Third, protein rich and dependable resources of the sea that would have otherwise been inaccessible would also have been brought within a zone of increasing exploitation. An important, protein rich, resource base would have been added to the ecological adaptation of not only those people living along the coasts and river-banks, but those peoples inland within a zone of contact and trade. Fourth, the sea afforded new routes of immigration and movements of people that might otherwise have been blocked by either geographical or social obstacles.

How extensive or well developed this form of traffic was by 8,000 BC, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution, we may never know. We can imagine small pockets of such development in protected or bay areas that featured shallow harbors, calm waters with little wave action, few strong currents, and short stretches of shoreline settlement featuring the same or very similar maritime or riverine ecological orientations. We can imagine a much more infrequent and irregular movement of boats along most shorelines.

Archaeological evidence of the "Quynh-Van" cultural sequence consist of coastal shell middens. First discovered in 1963 north of Vinh in the Nghe-An province, the first and earliest evidence of lowland occupation contemporaneous with the Bac-Sonian sequence, marking a cultural sequence distinct and separate from that which gave rise to the Phung-Nguyen sequence. Thirty-one flexed inhumation burials from Quynh Van have been found, with an absence of polished stone implements, and radiocarbon dated to the mid-fourth millennium BC Where these "Proto-Austronesian" peoples originally came from is not well established, though linguistic evidence points to South China. Whatever their direction of movement or rebounding, there is evidence of coastal shell middens of early Neolithic occupations along the coasts of central Vietnam. The people of Quynh-Van ate sea food as well as vegetables and used sea shells as cutting and shaping tools was well as stone implements. The most distinguishing feature of this culture are the shell mounds (also called kitchen middens) which yielded not only the discarded shells of edible molluscs, but also fragments of stone and pottery, animal and fish bones, charcoal and ash. Some of pottery showed crude basketry impression. Beneath the shell mounds were found several human burial sites. (Whitfield, pg. 244-5)

Higham notes the long tradition of coastal archaeology in Vietnam--there are four groupings of such sites--known as Bau Tro, Hoa Loc, Ha Long and Cai Beo "cultures." The earliest sequence at Cai Beo on the island of Cat Bo 40 km. from the shore of the Gulf of Bac Bo is a stone tool assemblage with strong "Hoabinhian affinities," as well as pottery with basketry impressions. Above this is found the shouldered axe of the Hoabinhian variety with cord-marked and incised pottery, dated to about 4545 BC. The final assemblage includes shouldered, polished stone axes and adzes parallel in type to the Ha Long culture. Burials were in a flexed position. The association of axes, adzes and hoes suggests an agricultural orientation.

Higham predicts that trends towards the establishment of food production may be found among the growing number of sedentary coastal groups who may have initiated settlement of the Middle Country--"the name given to the lowlands immediately above the confluence of the Red and Black rivers. These sites are ascribed to the Phung Nguyen culture." The obstacle to testing this possibility is the rarity of well-provenanced biological remains and the consideration of inter-site relations through the exchange of goods...a model for a similar situation is available for the Chao Phraya valley" (pg. 45).

These sites are very similar to sites further north in China such as "Ch'eng-Tzu-Yai" which suggests the possiblity of a "fising-shellfish gathering culture" existing along the coastal regions and primarily dependent upon fishing for subsistence. Shellfish and harpoon heads suggest at least partial dependence upon the products of the rivers and seas. Such a fishing-shellfish gathering culture might possess also the polished stone tools of Southeast Asia and the cord and mat-marked pottery of northern Asia. Its conversion to agriculture would lead to movements inland, particularly along the rivers, where fishing would still be a source of supplementary diet. The distribution of cord-marked and mat-marked wares from Siberia to Southeast Asia and Japan indicates a coast route and accordingly material traits for a fishing economy might perhaps be added. (Fairservice, 1959: pg. 97).

Fairservice notes in his "Stage 4B (3,500-2,000 BC) the development of a coastal-riverine culture which depended upon fishing and its economy. "It probably diffused from Southeast Asia and is best represented by a variety of polished and ground stone artifacts, particularly the celt. Rice cultivation, rude handmade pottery, basketry and net making, and possibly pole houses along with such traits as tattooing and canoe-building. (Fairservice, 1959 : pg. 139) These early shell-middens are associated with one of the earliest forms of "cultural sedentarism." "As such, it is felt legitimate to consider their culture within the general framework of complex sedentary and increasingly domesticated hunter-gatherers." (Higham, pg. 84)

Certainly by 3,000 BC, and possibly much earlier if we are to believe the evidence of coastal settlement sites, extensive waterway networks and maritime civilizations had already been developed in many regions of the world. We can suggest the existence of fairly extensive and effective shoreline networks of waterborne traffic and trade that formed the basis for regional/interregional integration that was one of the first precursors to the rise of the pristine states.

Between 4,000 and 2,000 BC, Austronesian speaking peoples; must have begun their "fanning out" upon the seas of Southeast Asia that culminated in their maritime feats of navigational prowess in Polynesia. The point of origin of these peoples is not known. Though linguistic concentration suggests somewhere in the Northeastern Melanesia, it remains strongly plausible that their earlier point of origin may originally have been northeastern Southeast Asia and Southern China. By this time, Chinese civilization had just emerged out of its mythological mists. Undoubtedly a well developed coastal fishing/trade network had been developed stretching from Japan to Southeast Asia. From somewhere along this expanse, Austronesian speaking peoples settled Formosa, the Philippines, Micronesia, Polynesia, the coastal regions of New Guinea, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and even reached across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar.

Excavations by Higham and Bannanurag at Khok Phanom Di (2,000-1,500 BC) in the Gulf of Thailand reveal irrefutable evidence of a well developed, pre-bronze age coastal dwelling culture whose primary diet was from the muddy banks of the sea. Such a region would have been pristine for the cultivation of wet rice, the development of which may have been stimulated by the gradually changing coastline. "It is self-evident that the origins of rice cultivation are of critical importance to an understanding of the processes involved in the massive expansion of human settlement now documented for the period 3,000-1,000 BC. At least two models for the origin of rice cultivation are feasible. One resembles that formulated for the Near East by Binford, followed by Flannery. It has the following principal features: coastal settlement in the few rich coastal/estuarine enclaves was sedentary. The occupants used pottery vessels, maintained cemeteries and exchanged goods with inland communities. Their economic base was the exploitation of marine resources. Sedentarism fostered population expansion, and settlements fissioned at critical population thresholds (a figure of 300-400 people is a common ceiling for autochthonous communities). When all suitable coastal terrain was taken up, new settlements were founded in the more marginal zone behind the seashore. It was in such areas that rice manipulation from a shy-seeding perennial to an annual variety was undertaken, a process which made possible the expansion of the human settlement which has been archaeologically documented.

An alternative model seeks stress in the actual coastal/estuarine sites, particularly as fluctuating sea levels impaired predictable food resources. This stress made the manipulation of rice a highly adaptive strategy, particularly as the sea level fell and coastal resources became increasingly remote. (C. F. W. Higham and R. Bannanurag The Excavation of Khok Phanom Di: A Prehistoric Site in Central Thailand Vol. 1 London: The Society of Antiquaries of London 1990: pg. 10-11).

We should not need to hook the rise of a maritime complex in Southeast and East Asia to the domestication of rice. It is clearly evident that the Polynesians may not have originally had rice as a staple carbohydrate, but relied instead upon what has been referred to as the "Yam-Taro-Sago" complex. The planting of root cultigens may have preceded the domestication of cereal grains.

Surely such a complex had been well established throughout the Pacific and, as is evident in the highlands of New Guinea, permitted large, but unstable population densities. "These crops do not in themselves provide a balanced diet for they provide little protein; if, however, the thesis that this early agriculture was developed from a fishing culture is correct, these protein needs would have been supplied by fish and shell fish." (Keith Buchanan 1963:pg. 63)

Associated with this complex are also the domesticated dog, chicken, ducks and geese and pig, all of which are rather small animals (boat-worthy) of the household or farmyard that are known to have had an early presence in Southeast Asia. (Carl Sauer Agricultural Origins and Dispersals: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs 1952: pg. 24-34.)

Carl Sauer has suggested the "cradle area" of agriculture lay in the Bay of Bengal area of Southeast Asia, "comprising Burma, the adjoining areas of Siam and Indochina, and parts of the coast plain of eastern India." This region "meets the requirements of high physical and organic diversity, of mild climates with...abundant rainy and dry periods, of many waters inviting to fishing, of location at the hub of the Old World for communication by water or by land. No other area is equally well suited or equally well furnished for the rise of a fishing farming culture.' (Sauer, 1952: pg.24) "Farming and fishing were initially closely associated, and it is here that we can find the beginnings of the domestication of animals, the development of planting techniques and for the improvement of plants for vegetative reproduction." (ibid.: pg 24)

The picture that emerges from this is the previous widespread presence of the "yam-taro-sago" complex throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It is one in which maritime trade networks and maritime resources were an important platform for regional integration, and then the gradual introduction of a new rice-cultivating culture, bringing with it a more stable sedentary settlement pattern, the need for plough-draft animals, larger local population densities, a strain on local protein resources, and the need to extend the range of fishing/trading networks, and the eventual rise of centralized states to control these networks based upon hierarchical exploitation of the rice-cultivating peasant.

This rice-cultivating complex overlaid, and to some extent partially supplanted the previous yam-taro-sago complex, but nowhere totally replacing it. "At the earliest stage of settled agriculture in the region, then, man was dependent on the yam-taro-sago complex of plants with domesticated animals of local origin and fishing to provide his protein needs. The subsequent agricultural history of the area centers around the progressive 'rolling-back' of the northwestern frontier of this early crop-complex as a result of the advance of the rice-complex..... The general picture that emerges is one of a progressive but uneven retreat of the earlier yam-taro-sago complex in the face of the newer wet-rice complex. The beginning o this retreat dates back far into the early history of the region but because of the ecological problems involved the processes by which the earlier cropping system were replaced were extremely slow." (Keith Buchanan The Southeast Asian World: An Introductory Essay London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd. 1967: pg.65-6, in reference to J. E. Spencer, Shifting Cultivation in Southeastern China 1966)

Though the ecology of rice is old, and we can distinguish, as J. E. Spencer does for "hierarchies of mixed cultivation" (J. E. Spencer, Shifting Cultivation in Southeastern China Berkely and Los Angeles: The University of California Press 1966: pgs. 136-165.) or as Lucien Hanks does, between broadcasting, harvesting, wild-gathering, and lowland cultivation of rice, (Lucien Hanks, Rice and Man: Agricultural Ecology in Southeast Asia Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM Publishing Corporation. 1972) we must place the development of lowland wet-rice cultivation in Southeast Asia, along with the development of early bronze-iron metallurgy, in the perspective of the rise of the early "Mandala" kingdoms.

This development may have been preceded by the rise of a cumulative regional population density and distribution over lowland-coastal areas of Southeast Asia that made the ease of migration to a new uninhabited area a less likely prospect. Wet-rice cultivation; made possible the rise of local population densities and a need for wider, trans-local integration. The form of migration associated with the "agricultural involution" (Clifford Geertz Agricultural Involution Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 1963,) of wet-rice cultivation was essentially a different, slower, steadier process than earlier inland/highland swidden adaptations or estuary coastal fishing-planting orientations. This adaptation can be associated with the spread of the Thai, the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, which eventually displaced or absorbed numerous local Mandalas within their arc of influence.

Whether or not early Mandalas depended directly or primarily upon rice-agriculture remains open to question. (C. F. W. Higham "Prehistoric Rice Cultivation in Southeast Asia" in Scientific American April, 1984, and The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989.) The Red River delta region of North Vietnam was fairly early incorporated into a more fully historical phase with its colonization by the Chinese in 111 B. C., but rice cultivation and irrigation had already been well-established in the region. (Jennifer Holmgren Chinese Colonization of Northern Vietnam Australia: Australian National University 1980.)

Evidence of Mandalas suggest a basis upon yam-taro-sago complex as well. Nevertheless, this must be seen as broadly a transitional period in the rise and development of early state organization, and is reflected in the transitional character of these Mandalas as well. What is apparent is that inland riverine civilizations may have developed relatively early along the Red River Delta of North Vietnam, and that peoples from the inland and peoples along the sea eventually amalgamated and produced a new Southeast Asian synthesis.

This contact was presumably with early "mandala" communities, tribes, chiefdoms and kingdoms across the seas and along adjacent coasts--evidence of Dong Song cultural artifacts is found in South China, Burma, Borneo, Indonesia, Vietnam, and even in New Guinea. These early polities were characterized, as later ones, by the theme of the organization and interdependence of diversity of almost every facet of life. "The mosaic of mainland Southeast Asian variability, especially ethnic and economic, is characterized by complex interdependence rather than discreteness...." (Jean Kennedy, "From Stage to Development in Prehistoric Thailand: An Exploration of the Origins of Growth, Exchange and Variability in Southeast Asia, in Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia, edited by Karl L. Hutterer, 1977:23)

As such early prehistoric Southeast Asian civilizations grew and developed, routes of exchange followed paths of exploration and settlement. Interregional articulation and variation constituted a growing environmental/ecological mosaic, an indigenous framework of reciprocal interdependencies of resource exchange against which later exogenous influence must be configured. Later traders followed already established local and interregional networks of exchange. Indigenous inland commodities were carried down stream to local coastal foci of exchange. The existence of such early loci of exchange stimulated the development of mutually beneficial exogenous trade that were probably not the result of external contacts alone. (ibid. pg. 31)

These early littoral chiefdoms or kingdoms formed "a single hypothetical class of ancient exchange networks, one which involves the control of a drainage basin opening to the sea by a center located at or near the mouth of that basin's major river." (B. Bronson, "Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends: Notes Towards a Functional Model of the Coastal State in Southeast Asia", in Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia, edited by K. Hutterer, 1977: 43) The most important characteristic of these early 'chiefdom/kingdoms' of trade-centered coastal states was their relative ephemeral character.

This early form of civilization is considered quite distinct from what is found in other early instances of the rise of civilization. "...The determining conditions of the Southeast Asian coastal systems include not only a river-interrupted coastline but a relatively unusual, almost neo-colonial, pattern of export trade." (Bronson, 1977: 51-2)

Jean Kennedy recognizes a three phase pattern in the development of these early "river-basin states" that corresponded to three broad zones of ecological exploitation--uplands, piedmont and coastal lowlands--with each zone corresponding to a major shift or innovation in the major mode of production. The rise of newer subsistence patterns did not replace earlier modes of production, but the complementariness of these systems resulted in an overall increase in the diversity and complexity of the system. The early pioneer phase of the opening of each zone is characterized by asymmetrical dependence of the pioneer settlers upon the products of the parent society. Preexisting relations of reciprocal exchange become extended by this early pioneering phase--"by virtue of this exchange, the overall spectrum is broadened." The spectrum becomes not only broadened and diversified, but is marked by a long-term tendency to shift within the framework of the old networks of exchange. "A series of successive steps carries with it the articulation of different modes of production by a proliferating network of exchanges.....The increase in diversity and differentiation of productive modes is conducive not only to further economic specialization, but also to the development of intra- and inter-group controls and to the rise of central place exchange. In such developments, perhaps, lies the origin of the ethnic mosaic of modern Southeast Asia." (Jean Kennedy, 1977: pgs. 35-6)

Nevertheless, prehistoric Southeast Asian civilization may have been marked by comparative isolation of groups with strong local identities, and a gradual pace of communication, exchange and change. "Cognatic kinship, an indifference towards lineage descent, and a preoccupation with the present that came from the need to identify in one's own generation those with abnormal spiritual qualities are, in my opinion, three widely represented cultural features in many parts of early Southeast Asia..." (O. W. Wolters, History, Culture and Relgion in Southeast Asian Perspectives 1982: pgs. 4-9)

Such features produced a cultural focus upon "men of prowess" accompanied by the mobilization of social networks within and between local settlements, and promoted characteristically regional attitudes of common expectation for achievement in public life as a means of acquiring prestige, as well as continuous public competition for pre-eminence that may have led to "adventures into neighboring settlement areas....Finally, and very important in the extension of communications between networks of settlements, leaders in neighboring areas would recognize the higher spiritual status of a man of outstanding prowess and seek to regularize their relations with him by means of alliances that acknowledged the inequalities of the parties." (Wolters, 1982: pgs. 4-9)

The prehistoric map of regional Southeast Asia is considered to have evolved from a complicated network of many small settlements into a hodge-podge patchwork of many overlapping spheres of power, or Mandalas or spheres of kings whose power, spiritually sanctioned, radiated out in concentric rings of lessening degrees of influence and prestige.

Boundaries existed only in the name of the ruler and the minds of his subjects, and peripheral regions, equidistant between two or more such centers, maintained a kind of ambivalent and chameleon identity between them. Identity in such a context is not defined by geo-political boundaries, or by cultural hegemony, but by the relative distance traveled between such centers--identities and loyalties were shifting, contextually relative, and possibly even contradictory. Within each Mandala, one king claimed universal authority and personal hegemony over other rulers within his sphere who were his allies and vassals. (ibid, pg. 16-17).

Such early Mandala kingdoms were inherently unstable, often expanding and contracting in concertina fashion. Warfare and acculturation failed to define a stable structural core--authority was always in open competition--"The mandala perimeters continued to replicate court situations at the center. Centers of spiritual authority and political power shifted endlessly...(ibid.: pg. 17)"

Wolters explains cultural diversity and regional variation by a consistent process of 'localizations' of exogenous elements to fit endogenous stylizations of meaning--the adaptation of foreign symbols to local needs and interests. "...Materials tended to be fractured and restated and therefore drained of their original significance....the materials had to be localized in different ways before they could fit into various local complexes of religious, social and political systems and belong to new cultural wholes. Only when this had happened would the fragments make sense in their new ambiences, the same ambiences which allowed the rulers and their subjects to believe that their centres were unique..."(ibid. p. 52)

The proto-history of Southeast Asia is marked by a theme of unity provided by a shared, common sense of a 'single ocean' which both facilitated and hindered communication and transportation. The unity of a shared sea provided by the outward looking orientation as well as a corresponding sense of receptiveness, hospitality and tolerance to foreign influence, alien people and their cultures. The need to maintain long distance trade ties brought with it the need to control piracy. The single ocean was a vast zone of neutral water which stable states sought to protect to maintain the mutual freedom of the seas. The linkages throughout Southeast Asia resembled a 'chain which would join together again even if one link were temporarily broken..." (ibid, pg. 39) "The single ocean is a significant fact of Southeast Asian historical geography, and continuous and lively commercial exchanges can be expected to have encouraged cultural communication that left a mark on Southeast Asian History..." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 40)

In general, a regional model of early Southeast Asian state organization and civilization emerges whose boundaries were primarily the radii of its commercial influence and networks of exchange. Such states were numerous and ephemeral, leaving few traces of their history. They developed to meet the need of control of conflict--protection of commercial and cultural interests-- and for more efficient resource acquisition, management and utilization, and the need for "an organized approach" to foreign relations--distant states demanded new local states. "...Thus interstate politics in traditional Southeast Asia were carried out to enhance the state's domestic political philosophy, and the division of the state into village and court components, with broadly different purposes and constituencies, had an important impact in foreign policy." (McCloud, Systems and Process in Southeast Asia: The Evolution of a Region, 1986: pg. 93.)

The prototypical Southeast Asian State was a kind of dual regal-ritual and mercantile city-state that was capable of several different directions of development. Such states formed a loose network of commercial-tributary linkages described as a regional interstate system that was traditional to the Southeast Asian setting. These systems were loose, relatively unstructured, without internal recognition as a system as such, and became increasingly economically dependent upon the existence of foreign trade and foreign agents for this trade--externally, such systems were recognizable as standing on their own. 

The basic type of Southeast Asian state might be labeled the subsistence, river delta kingdom. In the rough densely vegetated terrain of much of Southeast Asia, the river systems offered the best and frequently the only method of reaching inland areas. Each river valley also offered a somewhat protected enclosure in which to organize the state--the mountains watershed roughly forming the boundaries. Chieftains, once having established control over the mouths and main trunks of these river systems by force, sustained themselves and their positions by exacting tolls for goods and persons traveling the waterways. Such subsistence kingdoms were largely self-sufficient in food production and were active in international trade and exchange only to the extent of filling for the population needs that could not be met internally. "Referring to the natural drainage system of intermountain water systems as self-contained geographic units, Bronson hypothesized that control of a river artery or of one or more major tributaries provided opportunities to develop the "lord-subordinate" relationships needed to expand kinship ties into political units by providing revenues from controlled commercial and other river traffic. These revenues were the critical economic surplus needed for expansion." (Donald McCloud, 1986: 67-8)

It is at this point that we can begin to consider the historical period proper of Southeast Asia, and can talk about the various records of the Golden Khersonese, of Roman coins, of Chinese Eunochs and Brahmanic trader/priests. Prehistory and history overlap in an extended protohistorical period of several millenia of sketchy and incomplete records and fragmentary artifacts. History of the region really does not come into its own properly until the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. The Chinese had recorded a history of the region prior to that period, but most of it did not survive the later vicissitudes of Imperial dynastic politics when the Chinese suddenly became, once again, xenophobic to all that lay beyond its borders. Thus the protohistoric period which lasted from around the Birth of Christ even beyond the Portuguese period until the Dutch arrived to take their place, remains patchy and conjectural, indefinite in its time-line except for a few brief, but major, events.

In the main, the process of the regional and interregional integration of Southeast Asia continued with the rise and fall of the maritime oriented Mandala Kingdoms. What is important to note here is the continuing into historical times, until even today, of patterns of a riverine-maritime orientation that are time immemorial in Southeast Asia. We can speak, like Joseph Conrad, of the central importance that the rivers have played in the integration of life of Southeast Asia. "Beginning with the small rafts of bamboo or logs of the upriver people in the shallows and the gorges, we find lower down river hollowed out or plank rowboats, then sailboats, motor boats and, finally, river steamers. Near the estuaries we meet ocean-going steamers docked at the wharves of the bustling port cities. Technology, agriculture, and socio-legal organization also become increasingly complex as we voyage downstream..." (Colin Tweddel and Linda Kimball, Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of Asia 1985: pg. 279)

We are left to reconsider, and perhaps redefine, what we mean by culture and civilization in light of the evidence of the history of Southeast Asian peoples. Culture and civilization stand as "local/Grand" traditions, and suffer the same constraints as this kind of dichotomy. A static, spatial view of culture has always considered it tradition-bound, well defined by its boundaries, primarily endogenous and well-integrated as an historical isolate and social segregate, as primarily conservative in its resistance to change. Implicit in this view has been a paradoxical notion of change and conservatism and a sense of an ideal, non-relative base-line from which change and cultural evolution could be measured.

Both culture and civilization must be considered as the differential consequences of the same historical processes. In this regard, civilization as a process has always been occurring along side the development and divergence of many cultures. Ideas were the currency of historical civilization--no society could keep a secret for very long, and thus no human group has ever long maintained an exclusive monopoly upon knowledge. We can speak of the transformational, indeed revolutionary consequences of new ideas and their diffusion from multiple points of origin. Humankind, once having achieved fire, the bow, the boat, the wheel, the arch, was no likely to lose it again.

Civilization as process can be construed as basically a trans-cultural process that entailed the transformation of the exogenous cultural contexts in which local cultural developments became constrained and configured. We may find the Hoa Binhian or Dong Song civilization widespread, but occupied or possessed by a wide variety of culturally distinct peoples, just as today the world possesses the artifacts and some of the symbolic accouterments of modern industrial civilization, though the cultural diversity remains great. Once begun, the traffic in ideas and new things was usually, probably irreversible, if only because it was strongly motivated by human factors of interest and unrest. In time, such traffic new few boundaries that could not be overcome. Civilization has always been rooted in an historical intercultural context. Civilization can be considered to have been a source of background noise or interference that was omnipresent for most cultures, no matter how peripheral. The mere awareness of different peoples on the other side of the mountains, of the plains, of the seas, made likely, and therefore historically inevitable, contact, exchange, and exogenous change towards complex regional integration and interregional integration.

Whatever any given culture may have been at any period, it always stood in complementary balance with the cumulative sum of what all other distant cultures were also. Not only has it long been occupied by very ancient peoples and their cultures, but strong evidence also supports the idea that it has been a seat of su-generis civilization and the point of origin for the peopling of the Pacific.

Evidence also points to the suggestion that the patterning of many of its basic exchange networks and interregional contacts may have been as complex in the deeper prehistoric phases as they remain in the later proto-historic era. These were relations that have undoubtedly left an indelible mark upon the character of Southeast Asian civilization.

Civilization has always been rooted in an historical inter-cultural context. Civilization can be considered to have been a source of background noise or interference that was omnipresent for most cultures, no matter how peripheral--the mere awareness of different peoples on the other side of the mountains, of the plains, of the seas, made likely, and therefore historically inevitable, contact, exchange, and exogenous change towards complex regional integration and interregional integration. Whatever any given culture may have been at any period, it always stood in complementary balance with the cumulative sum of what all other distant cultures were also.

This leads to a view of historical processes and patterns of civilization as being not just chaotic but as being also complex. What may have stood as background noise in the form of destructive interference for one cultural grouping, may have from the standpoint of other cultural groupings constituted information that served as constructive interference.

We may consider a "micro-system/macro-system" model in the regional integration and development of Southeast Asian civilization, as a dynamic, dialectical tension between locally oriented, tradition bound cultures and open, regionally defined civilizational complexes.

This brings us to a systemic view of history as information and to a basic hypothesis that the historical structure of the long run will tend to always follow a normal distribution governed by the greatest background probability. If something is possible, no matter how unlikely, it will eventually happen if given a long enough frame of time. A corollary of this is that the most probable course will tend to always outweigh the least probable, and, though events may be interdependent and conditional in probability, the main pathways of historical developments will tend to follow a rather stable and expectable patterning of change, whatever our local intentions or knowledge.

History as regulated by a principle of unintended consequences is only history from a biased point of view that does not know, and therefore cannot take into full account, the many factors and variables that have entered into its production.

Human civilization has time immemorial been a kind of background chaotic possibility in the context of any cultural grouping. For the longest time, it was probably for most peoples minimum, and therefore a negligible source of noise. But its presence was irreversible, and it would not go away. In the long run, it grew such that in came to incorporate more and more different peoples and traditions within an increasingly complex web of historical conditionality and entailments, from which few if any peoples could really escape.

The rise of human civilization has been the rise of a critical system of interrelated cultural elements--a self-organizing system that has reached and surpassed a critical threshold of systemic stability. Civilization at any given period and place has been but a single historical moment of stability in this vast historical system.

Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction