Ancient Southeast Asia by John N. Miksic and Geok Yian Goh (review)

When opening a volume entitled Ancient Southeast Asia, one is inclined to ponder: 'How far does ancient extend here?' as well as 'What constitutes Southeast Asia?'. The temporal and spatial bounds of this volume and its subject are important. The 'ancient' rubric here extends from the earliest evidence of premodern hominids in Java some 1.6 million years ago until the beginning of the sixteenth century, with the arrival of Europeans and the emergence of the 'early modern' in the region. But what region are we referring to? The authors adopt an essentially modern definition of the Southeast Asia region, extending over the ten modern nation states of ASEAN, together with Timor Leste. This is fairly unexceptional in works on Southeast Asia, but as we progress into the volume, we encounter some broader contexts, with Southeast Asia being linked to many parts of South Asia and the areas which today we refer to as Yunnan. The Mongol incursions in the thirteenth century also extend the connections of the areas examined in the text. The volume's map of Southeast Asia (p. 2) appropriately portrays a region which extends north to the Yangzi River. This aspect of the appropriate 'scope' of Southeast Asian history will be returned to at the end of this review.

Some comment must be made on the name which the authors have assigned to the area their book engages with. For reasons unstated, the name of the Southeast Asian region has been truncated throughout the text into 'Seasia'. Never having encountered this term before, working my way through the text, I found myself frequently wincing as I repeatedly encountered 'Seasia' and its derivatives 'Seasian' and 'Seasians'. Fortunately the volume has many desirable attributes which counter-balance the shock induced by these unusual terms.

The authors, John Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, are Singapore-based archaeologist/historians, long involved in research on the Southeast Asian past, and their knowledge and skills have been melded in producing this very useful volume. Those seeking monographs or edited collections on overall pre-modern Southeast Asia have long had a rather limited choice of works on which to draw. From the studies by Cœdès in the 1940s,¹ and by Wang Gungwu² and Paul Wheatley³ in the 1950s and 1960s, through the Smith and Watson collection in the 1970s,⁴ a base was established for an overall history of early Southeast Asia. Then came the works by Wolters,⁵ the Reid volumes,⁶ the Tarling-edited Cambridge History,⁷ and the Lieberman studies.⁸ More recently we have seen volumes and collections by Hall,⁹ Ricklefs,¹⁰ and Ooi and Hoàng.¹¹

In terms of period, scope and aspiration, the book under review perhaps most overlaps with the works by Cœdès, Wolters, Higham,¹² O'Reilly,¹³ and the Cambridge History. It transcends all of these, however, in terms of the amount of information conveyed, the studies incorporated, the ideas addressed, the integration of ideas and sites, and the connectivities which are brought into the narrative. Strangely, given the series under which it is published—the Routledge World Archaeology series—this volume is not overtly archaeological. In some books, the scientific data-driven nature of archaeological studies results in the overarching historical context being lost. That is not the case here as, within the 600 pages of the volume, the authors have obviously tried to foreground historical processes and trajectories, presenting supporting archaeological evidence within the scope of the periods and phenomena being described. The presentation is concise and the nature of the text suggests that the book was written with the idea that it could be assigned as a textbook in a university setting.

The volume begins by introducing the climatic, geographical, linguistic and ecological aspects of the region before proceeding to the earliest evidence of humans therein and the subsequent development of agriculture, sedentary settlements, religious beliefs, metal-casting, and...