Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia by Karl L. Hutterer

Author:Karl L. Hutterer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Archaeology and Palaeogeography in the Straits of Malacca

by

JohnN. Miksic

Archaeologists have found few sites of early coastal settlement in Southeast Asia. Gorman (1971) analyzed eighteen Hoabinhian sites, fifteen inland and only three coastal; he noted that few other Hoabinhian maritime sites are known, and explained the scarcity of such sites by reference to a postulated two-meter rise of the sea level in the Recent Epoch which may have destroyed most of these sites. Gorman also noted that no Hoabinhian sites have been found in alluvial plains, and that “this is unexpected” (1971:306).

Historical sources are available from the first millennium A.D. and later which yield progressively more information regarding societies of the Southeast Asian coasts and alluvial plains. References to these societies frequently occur in the context of commercial activity. These literary sources suggest that as early as the second century A.D. commerce formed an integral part of the adaptation of some Southeast Asian coastal societies.

The difficulty in locating coastal sites in Southeast Asia can be linked to considerations of the interaction of human activity and the processes of coastal formation. Closer attention to changes in the Southeast Asian land-sea boundary and to possible consequences of this geomorphological instability for coastal societies may augment future investigations of early maritime Southeast Asian culture and long-distance trade.

Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Adaptation

Recent workers in the Mediterranean have called attention to the classical Greek literary genre of chorography. In this type of writing Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny and others included descriptions both of various societies and of the lands in which they lived (McDonald 1972:9-10). Arguing for the combination of similar sets of observation, Kraft (1972) proposed the union of sedimentation process study, coastal geology, and archaeology as a discrete subfield of scientific research. To this group of fields others have added history and settlement pattern study (McDonald and Rapp 1972b; Vita-Finzi 1969).

An interdisciplinary study of the Mississippi River delta conducted in the 1950s (McIntire 1958, 1959; Gould and McFarlane 1959; Byrne, LeRoy and Riley 1959) combined coastal geology and archaeology. The deltaic coast of Louisiana has built seaward fifteen miles “since sea level stabilized” (Gould and McFarlane 1959). The coastal plain of Mississippi sediment thus laid down covers between 1200 (Byrne, LeRoy and Riley 1959) and 1500 (McIntire 1959) square miles. This plain is dissected by minor branches of the main river channel; major and minor rivers have built levee systems. Cheniers (banks of sand), shells and other debris heaped up by storms on former beaches also form areas of raised ground. On these cheniers (the most recently formed of which are found in environments of swamps and lagoons) American Indians lived for centuries, exploited the rich food resources of the swamps and coastal waters nearby, and left occupational debris—shells, bones, tools and potsherds.

As the shore prograded with the deposition of new sediment, the Indians shifted their settlements from time to time in order to remain in the same habitat, with access to both marine and estuarine resources. Thus older sites are on cheniers further from the present coast, and on levees abandoned by distributaries at earlier stages of delta formation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.