Book Description

From initial hominid settlement to the dawn of history... This book describes the human prehistory of the islands of Indonesia and Malaysia from initial hominid settlement, more than one million years ago, to the eve of the historical Hindu--Buddhist and Islamic civilizations. The archaeological record provides the central theme, and additional chapters deal with essential information from the palaeoenvironmental sciences and the disciplines of biological anthropology, linguistics, and social anthropology. The overall goal of the work is to bring a multidisciplinary focus to bear on questions concerning past cultural and biological developments within the region. Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago interests those concerned with the fields of Pleistocence environments, and archaeology, as also students and researchers with an active interest in Southeast Asia. From the Preface This book presents a multidisciplinary reconstruction of the prehistory of the modern nations of Indonesia and Malaysia, as viewed from the perspective of the whole South-East Asian and Australasian region. Since modern nation boundaries have little meaning for the student of the remote past, I refer to the region in the following chapters as "the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago". Several interlinked aspects of prehistory are reviewed, mainly from data produced by the disciplines of biological anthropology, linguistics and archaeology, and the overall time-span runs from about 2 million years ago to approximately AD 1000. In general, the book ceases with the historical civilisations of the first millennium AD, although it should be realised that prehistory sensu stricto continued in some remote regions to almost the present day.