-
1. Early Southeast Asian Political Systems
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
- Additional Information
By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville Early Southeast Asian Political Systems 5 1. EARLY SOUTHEAST ASIAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS O.W. WOLTERS Excerpted from O.W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), by permission of the publisher. Aremarkable development in Southeast Asian studies since the Second World War has been the steadily improving knowledge of the region’s prehistory.’1 The best known discoveries, made possible by scientifically conducted excavations and the tools of carbon dating, thermoluminescence , and palaeobotany, are signs of bronze-working and domesticated agriculture at certain sites in northeastern Thailand attributable to the fourth millennium BC. Iron-working, too, seems to have been under way at one of these sites by about 1500 BC. Moreover, by the second half of the second millennium BC at the latest, metallurgy had become the most recent stage in a local cultural process over a sufficiently wide area in northern Vietnam to permit Vietnamese archaeologists to broach sophisticated sociological enquiries. For my purpose, the important consequence of current prehistoric research is that an outline of the ancient settlement map is beginning to be disclosed. The map seems to comprise numerous networks of relatively isolated but continuously occupied dwelling sites, where residential stability was achieved by exploiting local environmental resources to sustain what is sometimes called continually expanding “broad spectrum” subsistence economies. The inhabitants’ original skills were those of “forest efficiency”, or horticulture, although during the second millennium BC domesticated modes of wet-rice agriculture were probably appearing in the mainland alluvial plains.2 These tendencies in prehistoric research provide helpful perspectives for historians of the early Southeast Asian political systems, for they are now being encouraged to suppose that by the beginning of the Christian era a patchwork of small settlement networks of great antiquity stretched across the map of Southeast Asia. For example, no less than about three hundred settlements, datable by their artifacts as belonging to the seventh and eighth centuries AD, have been identified in Thailand alone by means of aerial photography .3 Seen from the air, they remind one of craters scattered across the moon’s surface. The seventh-century inscriptions of 001a AR Ch 1 22/9/03, 11:59 AM 5 By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville 6 O.W. Wolters Cambodia mention as many as thirteen toponyms sufficiently prominent to be known by Sanskritic names. The multiplicity of Khmer centres, for there were surely more than thirteen, contradicts the impression provided by Chinese records of protohistoric Cambodia that there was only a single and enduring “kingdom of Funan”.4 “Funan” should not, I shall suggest below, be invoked as the earliest model of an “Indianized state” in Southeast Asia. The historian, studying the dawn of recorded Southeast Asian history, can now suppose with reasonable confidence that the region was demographically fragmented. The ethnic identity and remotest origins of these peoples are questions that I shall eschew. Before the Second World War, prehistorians framed hypotheses based on tool typology to argue that culturally significant migrations into the region took place from the second half of the second millennium BC. These hypotheses have now been overtaken by the disclosing chronology of much earlier technological innovation established by means of prehistoric archaeology . Rather than assuming migrations from outside the region, we can be guided by Donn Bayard’s view that prehistoric Southeast Asia was a “continually shifting mosaic of small cultural groups, resembling in its complexity the distribution of the modern hill tribes”.5 The focus of attention must be on what some of these groups could do inside the region and what they became. The ancient inhabitants of Southeast Asia were living in fairly isolated groups, separated by thick forests, and would have had powerful attachments to their respective localities. I shall have occasion later to discuss the continuation of the prehistoric settlement pattern in historical times, and I shall content myself here by noting that in Java, for example, local scripts6 and local sung poems7 survived through the centuries. Or again, Malyang, a small principality in north-western Cambodia during the seventh century, disappears from the records after the late eighth century but reappears in the late twelfth century as a rebellious area when Angkor was sacked by the Chams in 1177.8 The modern names of villages and subregions are also often identifiable in early written records...