Project MUSE®: Asian Perspectives - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Asian Perspectives.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 39 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: Asian PerspectivesTWOProject MUSE®Asian Perspectives1535-82830066-8435Latest articles in Asian Perspectives. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors' Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981943
<p></p>
Asian Perspectives highlights leading research in archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and biological anthropology in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Volume 64, Issue 2 of Asian Perspectives offers four articles on the ancient past of Asia and Island Southeast Asia. Our lead article (Zhang) focuses on the evidence for social complexity and militarism in the central plains of China. This is followed by an analysis of ritual activity as indicated by bronze manufacture at the site of Sanxingdui in southwest China (He). This issue's final two articles cover research on Hoa Lu's urban landscape, a major historical city in Vietnam (Vo), followed by a study of possible crocodile predation on humans and the symbolic behavior of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallEditors' Note2026-02-05text/htmlen-USEditors' Note2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®31122026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Violence in Jiahu: Social Conflict, Ideology, and Power in a Transegalitarian Chinese Society
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981944
<p></p>
The Jiahu site, situated in China's Central Plain, is a renowned settlement in East Asia dating to the Chinese Middle Neolithic (9000–7000 b.p.) (Zhongguo 2010:802). Occupied ca. 9000–7500 b.p., Jiahu offers profound insights into the emergence of social complexity during the Early Holocene (Zhang and Cui 2013) (Fig. 1). Jiahu spanned an area of over 55,000 m2 at its peak, dwarfing contemporaneous sites that were typically less than 10,000 m2 (Liu and Chen 2012:142). Multiple seasons of excavations have revealed an area of over 3000 m2 and have uncovered a wealth of material culture, including advanced stone and bone tools, symbolic artifacts such as tortoise shells with pebbles inside, bone flutes, and turquoise
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallViolence in Jiahu: Social Conflict, Ideology, and Power in a Transegalitarian Chinese Society2026-02-05text/htmlen-USViolence in Jiahu: Social Conflict, Ideology, and Power in a Transegalitarian Chinese Society2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1949472026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Differentiation of Ritual Practices through Bronze Artifact Analysis at Sanxingdui Site, Southwest China
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981945
<p></p>
The study of ancient societies often focuses on ritual practices, which serve as windows into peoples' religious, social, and cultural lives. Rituals, by definition, involve a series of formal behaviors that follow specific rules. Ritual can be defined asA culturally constructed system of symbolic communication … constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in multiple media, whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition).A crucial question in archaeological research is whether multiple coexisting ritual programs can be discerned within any given single
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallDifferentiation of Ritual Practices through Bronze Artifact Analysis at Sanxingdui Site, Southwest China2026-02-05text/htmlen-USDifferentiation of Ritual Practices through Bronze Artifact Analysis at Sanxingdui Site, Southwest China2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1319402026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Urban Landscape of Hoa Lu, the Tenth-Century C.E. Capital of Vietnam
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981946
<p></p>
Located about 90 km south of Hanoi in the Red River basin, Hoa Lu (c.e. 968–1010) was the second great Vietnamese capital city to be established after the end
Fig 1
Location of ancient capitals and major urban settlements in Vietnam.
[AI Generated Alt Text] Two maps of Vietnam colored by elevation with red dots marking ancient capitals Thang Long Co Loa Lien Lau Hoa Lu Hue Sai Gon
of Chinese domination and the first capital of Dai Co Viet, an independent dynastic Vietnamese polity (Fig. 1). Hoa Lu was founded after more than ten centuries of conflict during which the Viet people fought for their independence from various Sinitic dynasties (Vien 2017). In 938 c.e., Ngo Quyen's great victory on the Bach Dang River
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallThe Urban Landscape of Hoa Lu, the Tenth-Century C.E. Capital of Vietnam2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Urban Landscape of Hoa Lu, the Tenth-Century C.E. Capital of Vietnam2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®1030322026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Burial from Aleti Tunu Bibi Cave, Atauro Island, East Timor: A Possible Victim of a Crocodile Attack?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981947
<p></p>
Wallacea is a biogeographic region stretching between Sundaland and the Sahul Shelf (Fig. 1a). Despite wide fluctuations in sea levels during the earliest phase of Homo sapiens settlement, the region has remained insular and today comprises more than ten thousand small islands. Given that Homo sapiens can be found in Sumatra by about 63,000 years ago (Louys et al. 2022; Westaway et al. 2017) and in northern Australia by 65,000 years ago (Clarkson et al. 2017), there is no doubt that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were able to cross the islands and ocean spanning Wallacea and had the capacity to exploit new environments (Roberts and Stewart 2018).The oldest known indirect evidence of modern human settlement in
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallThe Burial from Aleti Tunu Bibi Cave, Atauro Island, East Timor: A Possible Victim of a Crocodile Attack?2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Burial from Aleti Tunu Bibi Cave, Atauro Island, East Timor: A Possible Victim of a Crocodile Attack?2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®2626872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Ideas and Images: A Historical Interpretation of Eastern Vindhyan Rock Art, India by Ajay Pratap (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981948
<p></p>
Figurative and cognitive-symbolic expressions of concepts, ideas, symbols, and objects perceived in the physical and mental worlds of humans, and the traces of their activities resulting as functional expressions, which may appear as works of art, occur as rock art, petroglyphs, petrographs, geoglyphs, cupules, and other forms across space and time. While humans created these forms, animals too cognize various organisms, including their prey, and their dimensions and behaviour, their images and shades, and other traces in their mental images before they choose to undertake a particular behaviour such as attack, not attack, or befriend, and have symbiotic relationships, but they do not seem to express them in an art
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallIdeas and Images: A Historical Interpretation of Eastern Vindhyan Rock Art, India by Ajay Pratap (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USIdeas and Images: A Historical Interpretation of Eastern Vindhyan Rock Art, India by Ajay Pratap (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®292892026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05The Origins of Agriculture in the Bronze Age Indus Civilization by Jennifer Bates (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981949
<p></p>
The archaeology of early urban civilizations and the origins of agriculture are perennial topics of archaeological research, but it seems fair to say that books on these topics have rarely focused on the Indian subcontinent. The current book concentrates on the Indus Valley and adjacent regions (i.e., Baluchistan, Ganges Valley, and Saurashtra Peninsula), providing an in-depth treatment of the archaeobotanical evidence of the Harappan civilization, including its emergence and post-urban transformations. Despite its title, this is not really a book about the origins of agriculture. Rather, it is about the components of Harappan agricultural systems. The author reviews all the players (the crops), stage setting
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallThe Origins of Agriculture in the Bronze Age Indus Civilization by Jennifer Bates (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USThe Origins of Agriculture in the Bronze Age Indus Civilization by Jennifer Bates (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®256862026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05Progress of Archaeobotanical Research at the Deccan College (2000-2020) by Satish Naik (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981950
<p></p>
This modest volume is number 13 in a series of small monographs published to commemorate the bicentenary of Deccan College, a postgraduate college with a long history of research in archaeology and Indian linguistics. Apart from the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany (redubbed Palaeosciences) in Lucknow, Deccan College has the second longest history of archaeobotanical research in India, with the first publication of research from its archaeobotanical laboratory dating back to 1974 (Kajale 1974). The author of the current book, Satish Naik, completed their Ph.D. at Deccan in 2012 and has been running the archaeobotanical laboratory for just over a decade.This book is largely a summary of research conducted by
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallProgress of Archaeobotanical Research at the Deccan College (2000-2020) by Satish Naik (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USProgress of Archaeobotanical Research at the Deccan College (2000-2020) by Satish Naik (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®86742026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05A Maritime Vietnam: From the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century by Li Tana (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951
<p></p>
This masterful work stands as a summary of a lifetime of scholarly output by Li Tana. Starting with her earliest monograph in 1998, Li's scholarship has primarily focused on Nguyẽ̂n Cochinchina. However, she has also made substantial contributions to the study of the early Jiaozhi and Cham polities and their commercial links overseas. In this book, Li pulls together all of these elements into a single sweeping narrative, a feast of both far-ranging vision and enticing detail.In the Introduction, Li lays out her objectives: to refocus the history of Vietnam away from the "autonomous local village" (pp. ix–xi) and instead toward urban spaces, maritime networks, and non-state (mostly commercial) actors. She also seeks
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981951">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/17/image/coversmallA Maritime Vietnam: From the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century by Li Tana (review)2026-02-05text/htmlen-USA Maritime Vietnam: From the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century by Li Tana (review)2026-02-052026TWOProject MUSE®103472026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-02-05