Finds of imported ceramics, especially early Chinese stonewares, are relatively rare in the mountainous interior of Sumatra. In 1977, however, Indonesian archaeologists discovered a series of five megalithic sites in Kecamatan Sumberjaya, Kabupaten Lampung Utara, about 85 kilometres northwest of Kotabumi the district administrative centre and some distance south of the road to Liwa and Krui. These sites were completely unknown in the Dutch colonial period and only came to light when Javanese immigrants moved in to the area in the nineteen fifties. Consequently, the present names by which these locations are known tend to reflect recent Javanese usage rather than indigenous nomenclature. Excavations at the complex known as Telagamukmin in Desa Purwawiwitan, Kecamatan Sumberjaya in 1980 revealed considerable quantities of locally made earthenware sherds and fragments of imported south Chinese stonewares dating from the ninth to tenth centuries, the Five Dynasties and northern Song periods in China. A bronze bracelet, two bronze blades and other metal fragments were also recovered. Quantities of ceramic sherds have also been recovered as surface finds at other locations including Batuberak and Batutameng Desa Purajaya, Ciptaarga, Bungin and Cabangdua.

One of the constant problems for historians of Southeast Asia is to assimilate its system of adding extra days and extra years to the lunar calendar to make it keep pace with the solar calendar. It is well known that the addition of an extra month should take place 7 times in every 19 years (adhikames), and that the addition of an extra day should occur 11 times in every 57 years (adhikawan). It is also known that the extra month is called second Ashadha and that in Thailand and Cambodia the extra day is given to the previous month, Jyestha.

The story of Southeast Asia's incorporation into the “world” — or, more properly, Western — rice market is well known. Indeed, this story is sufficiently familiar so as almost to invite employment of the presumptuous “as every schoolboy knows” rhetorical conceit. Briefly put, the region's incorporation into this market is said to have coincided with the “New Imperialism”, more or less as defined by Hobson and Lenin: the period between about 1860 or 1870 and 1900 or 1910. From small-scale beginnings in the 1850s and 1860s, Southeast Asia's extra-Asian rice trade is said to have grown dramatically in the years after 1870, quickly transforming a situation of market equilibrium into one of disequilibrium.

In September 1990 the Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam (CASA) organized an International Workshop on “Plantation Labour in Colonial Asia”. Most of the presented papers dealt with plantations where the workforce had to be imported from distant regions, sometimes even from abroad. The type of human community originating from such recruitment policies often resulted in a typical frontier society, characterized by extreme harshness on the part of the white planters, and by a sense of utter alienation and isolation among the Asian labourers.

The growth of the pre-World War II rubber industry in British Malaya is, in contrast to the staple industries of many less-developed countries, exceptionally well-researched. P.T. Bauer and J.H. Drabble have written seminally on the rubber industry, while a number of others, including C. Barlow, have made important contributions. Yet an outstanding feature of the British Malayan industry remains relatively overlooked: the development of the Singapore rubber market.

The shadowplay of Southeast Asia has often been understood as a reflection of local cultural patterns, and it has therefore been the object of much scholarly interest. That interest has been directed especially at the Javanese play, although much has also been written about Balinese and Malaysian shadowplay performances. The shadowplay performance is not usually associated with Thailand, and the shadowplay there has not been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny as in Indonesia and Malaysia. Nevertheless, such a tradition is thriving among Tai-speaking Buddhist peoples in peninsular (Southern) Thailand, particularly in the provinces of Songkhla, Thammarat, and Phatthalung on the long-settled rice plain stretching from Songkhla near the Malay border to Nakhon Si Thammarat, where most puppeteers are found.

Thai religion is changing. So is Thai society. To most scholars the connection is obvious: social and especially material changes drive religious ones. So a new middle class causes religious ferment while a crisis in legitimacy explains a militant Buddhist movement as well as the fervour for amulets and forest monks. Such explanations are typical in using extra-religious current events to explain religious change. We need not dispute their specific interpretations to make a larger historical point: today's religious changes are, if only in part, the unintended consequences of a century and a half of Sangha reform that has undermined the local Buddhism of the temple or wat. In effect centralizing reforms took the wat away from locals and, by driving folk practices out of the temple, fostered today's religious “free market”. This long-term institutional shift, changing the wat's place in Thai society, can be the context for understanding today's religious changes.