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Southeast Asian Ceramics

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Introduction

The origin of ceramics and their associated technologies – that of the manipulation of clay and pyrotechnology – in Southeast Asia is an important archaeological question that has yet to be researched in detail. Recent fossil and archaeological evidence suggest that the initial colonization of Southeast Asia by H. sapiens must have occurred sometime between the terminus ante quem of their arrival on Sundaland around 73 ka BP and that of their eventual migration to Sahul at 65 ka (Bellwood 2013: 67, 72, 2017: 89–92; Clarkson et al. 2017; Westaway et al. 2017), with a more conservative estimate placing this migration between 45–50 ka BP (O’Connell et al. 2018). It was to take, however, at least another 65,000–60,000 years before the emergence of the first ceramic artifacts within the bands of hunter-gatherer societies populating the region at that time. This perceptibly long delay in the development of ceramic technology in Southeast Asia is even more perplexing, given that...

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Further Reading

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  1. School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Tse Siang Lim

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  1. Posgrado en Arqueología, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México, DF, Mexico

    Patricia Fournier

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Lim, T.S. (2019). Southeast Asian Ceramics. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3149-1

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