My late colleague and mentor Pamela Gutman began her career in the 1970s with studies of first millennium ce Arakan, now a western state of Myanmar. From the time I started working with her 20 or so years ago, a recurrent theme was that the more you looked at areas of Southeast Asia outside Burma/Myanmar, our area of specialization, the more similarities you detected, and needed to explain. Many others, of course, were being affected by this paradigm shift. Specialists, who had perhaps been bound to local regions by elements as simple as hard-sought permission from national governments, ongoing relationships with local colleagues, or funding bodies who preferred a tightly focused programme of research, began to cast academic glances further afield. This was aided by other elements not directly related to pure research: political enthusiasm, particularly in the ASEAN nations, for international co-operation in many fields, including archaeological and historical research; lower air fares that enabled regional and European-US-Australasian scholars alike to visit for conferences or field trips; and email, which created an instantaneous collegiality.
In the area of Southeast Asian historical archaeology, Miksic and Geok have provided a detailed synthesis that explores the disparate issues we proto-Southeast Asianists had been discussing and, notably, suggests a framework for analysis. Ancient Southeast Asia proposes that we can now see several distinct periods of premodern history, and throws up interesting and challenging discussion points related to each.
In the Protoclassic period (1 to 600 ce) when bronze and iron technologies were operational, we are asked to consider that the major advances in metallurgy were made by artists experimenting with materials, not by weapons manufacture, on the basis that people in immediate danger will not turn to new technologies to defend themselves, but instead adapt their existing technologies. The authors then go on to explore the relationships in this period between history, art and culture.
The Early Classic period (600–900 ce) sees an art style marked by standardized iconography, mainly seen in temple architecture, and the formation or emergence of kingdoms which “wrote inscriptions, built monuments of permanent materials and were diplomatically recognised by China”. Miksic and Geok propose that trade in this period was dominated by the Sumatran kingdom of Srivajaya, a claim that might cause the Burma or Cambodia specialist to rush to the index for further evidence. It sent your reviewer to page 315 for something of a lightbulb moment. It's a treat to come across information that illuminates the relationship of individuals to the ancient economy. Inscriptions at Srivajaya discuss, among other things, the tax status of occupational groups such as comedians and pimps. Who could resist exploring this topic further, something that as teachers as well as researchers, Miksic and Geok would surely have hoped we would do?
The Middle Classic (900–1200 ce) sees the rise of Angkor and Bagan, and the disappearance of coinage from mainland Southeast Asia. On this latter topic, Miksic and Geok might have profited by reviewing the work of numismatists such as Cribb, Mitchiner and Mahlo, none of whom appear in the bibliography. This is an uncharacteristic hole in their otherwise comprehensive collection of data. But numismatists are a funny lot, so perhaps they are best left aside anyway.
In the Late Classic era (1200–1400 ce) Bagan and Angkor decline, and across the region, Theravada Buddhism displaces Hinduism and esoteric Buddhism. As the timescale moves to the Postclassic (1400–1600 ce) the discussion covers relationships with European colonialists, China and India, explores that rare effacement of Hinduism and esoteric Buddhism from such a large and sophisticated region, and covers the spread of Islam.
Ancient Southeast Asia provides pointers towards what we do not know enough about. In this way, it is of practical value to, say, the PhD candidate or postdoc in search of an area of specialization: Miksic and Geok include DNA studies, colonial interaction, urbanization, maritime trade, religion, art, technology, the status of women and monument construction in the list of topics that will benefit from future research.
The main thrust of this book is to present a hypothesis, supported by well-summarized and referenced data, with an extensive review of historical and theoretical approaches to the topic. The more you look at Southeast Asia, the hypothesis goes, the more similarities you find, and these similarities can be explained within the framework of distinctive “classic” periods. This is an elegant approach to the historical archaeology of an area that covers 3 per cent of the surface of the world and eleven modern nations.
