Early Southeast Asia: Old Wine in New Skins?—A Review Article

Abstract

Early SoutheastAsia is an impressive collection of papers dealing with the archaeology, history, epigraphy, art history, and geography of early Southeast Asian states and their development. The high scholarship of individual contributions notwithstanding, the collection as a whole demonstrates that the past thirty years have seen relatively little progress in understanding this important aspect of the social and cultural history of the region. Archaeologists have made many important new discoveries but have been unable to bring them to bear within a historical synthesis; related disciplines have dealt with other types of evidence but also seem unable to translate them into a common language of cultural and social meaning.