6 - Was There a Late Prehistoric Integrated Southeast Asian Maritime Space? Insight from Settlements and Industries

Summary

Introduction

The focus on globalization has encouraged researchers in the humanities to rethink cultural processes on wide spatial and temporal scales, i.e. those of the world and the long-term (Assayag 1998), and to emphasize processes of social, economic and cultural integration. When understood as an approach to history, researchers looked for processual continuities from prehistory to the modern era that could explain contemporary globalization (Beaujard 2005, 2012a, 2012b; Beaujard, Berger and Norel 2009). Researchers hold that human history, when understood as a global process, has already experienced several sociocultural translocal processes of “globalizations”, such as Hellenization and Romanization in Europe, and Indianization and Islamization in Southeast Asia (Amselle 2000; Assayag 1998). While those translocal processes have been made the subject of abundant research over an extended period of time, the hypothesis of a maritime Southeast Asian globalization, possibly dominated by Austronesian speakers, is a relatively new field of research. The notion of an integrated maritime Southeast Asian space has long been advocated by Braudel-inspired historians such as Anthony Reid, for whom long-established interconnections within the South China Sea accounted for the strong spatial and human integration he observed in Southeast Asia in modern times. However, recent advances in the field of prehistory led a few archaeologists to argue for an interaction sphere that existed already in the prehistoric period (Bulbeck 2008; Hung et al. in press; Solheim 2006). Indeed, it is now demonstrated that in the second millennium BC populations actively interacted and exchanged technologies, human experiences and valuable goods thanks to an advanced sailing technology within the South China Sea. From then on some networks were established, as indicated by shared ceramic traditions and the circulation of characteristic nephrite ornaments. For these archaeologists, these interactions could well have laid the ground for common practices and cultural affinities accounting for the ease with which populations have been circulating and exchanging goods and ideas from the Metal Age, by 500 BC. From this period onward, exchanges increased and transethnic networks began to generate significant quantity of characteristic stone and glass ornaments, distinctive decorated ceramics related to the “Sa Huynh-Kalanay complex”—an expression forged by Solheim (1961)—whose distribution spans from the shores of the Thai–Malay Peninsula to those of the Philippines and of the Indonesian archipelago.