ISBN10: 0199355355, ISBN13: 9780199355358, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Hardcover Hardcover. Southeast Asia ranks among the most significant regions in the world for tracing the prehistory of human endeavor over a period in excess of two million years. It lies in the direct path of successive migrations from the African homeland that saw settlement by hominin populations such as Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis. The first Anatomically Modern Humans, following a coastal route, reached the region at least 60,000 years ago to establish ahunter gatherer tradition that survives to this day in remote forests.From about 2000 BC, human settlement of Southeast Asia was deeply affected by successive innovations that took place to the northand west, such as rice and millet farming. A millennium later, knowledge of bronze casting penetrated along the same pathways. Copper mines were identified and exploited, and metals were exchanged over hundreds of kilometers. In the Mekong Delta and elsewhere, these developments led to early states of the region, which benefitted from an agricultural revolution involving permanent ploughed rice fields. These developments illuminate how the great early kingdoms of Angkor, Champa, and Funan cameto be, a vital stage in understanding the roots of the present nation states of Southeast Asia. Assembling the most current research across a variety of disciplines--fromanthropology and archaeology to history, art history, and ...
Show/Hide image