Chapter 4 - New Paradigms for the Early Relationship between South and Southeast Asia : The Contribution of Southeast Asian Archaeology

Summary

Abstract

The study of the Indianization process in Southeast Asia was long kept in the hands of philologists and historians of art and architecture who rarely ventured into settlement excavations and paid little attention to mundane aspects of Southeast Asian societies. Far-reaching progress in archaeological research on proto-historic and early historic Southeast Asia has proved that contact, exchange, and trade between Southeast Asia and India were persistently conducted during the millennium that preceded the Indianization of the region. This chapter presents research carried out in a variety of coastal sites, which resulted in a reappraisal of the mastery of nautical technologies, of the state formation and urbanization of the region, and of the role of Buddhism and Vaishnavism in the Indianization process, thus questioning the nature of the long-lasting relationship across the Bay of Bengal and returning agency to Southeast Asian people and polities.

Keywords: Southeast Asia; archaeology; maritime trade; agency; state formation

Archaeology was not a forte of the colonial period scholars who put together the first coherent narratives of Southeast Asian pre-modern history. Until the 1960s, with few exceptions, archaeology of Southeast Asia was restricted to prehistory and, for the historical periods, to the study of art history and architecture. Most excavations were carried out during the protracted process of cleaning up and restoring religious monuments; many were meant to bring to light as many statues and inscriptions as possible, too often with little consideration for the context and environment of such finds. The long-standing debates regarding the nature of “Indianization” (or “Hinduization”) of the region –– that is, the understanding of the process which resulted in the transfer of a set of South Asian cultural traits to Southeast Asian societies –– remained moreover very much within the realm of scholars trained as Indologists, most of them philologists (mainly epigraphists) or historians of art and architecture. They rarely ventured into excavations of settlement sites, and altogether paid little attention to mundane aspects of Southeast Asian societies. During the first half of the 20th century, they also remained men of their times and reproduced stereotypes developed in Europe for the study of Greek and Roman cultural expansions.