Ceramic Variability, Social Complexity and the Political Economy in Iron Age Cambodia and Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 500 BC-AD 500)

Abstract

Prehistoric socio-organizational complexity in Mainland Southeast Asia largely occurs in the archaeological record in the form of transegalitarian differential wealth across mortuary contexts during the Bronze Age (c. 1,000-500 BC) after a period of comparatively egalitarian distribution of wealth during the Neolithic (c. 3,000-1,500 BC) and preceding hunter-gatherer milieu in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. Thereafter, social stratification on the basis of material cultural wealth and entrenched hierarchies begin to appear during the Iron Age (c. 500 BC-AD 500) with the rise of complex polities vis-a-vis the expansion of Chinese influence into northern Vietnam, as well as the emergence of a maritime trading network between China and the Mediterranean world through Southeast Asia and India. This rapid ascent of complexity over a largely unstratified socio-organizational milieu during the Bronze Age paved the way for the rise of Funan and other complex polities during the Iron Age in the region. By the sixth century AD, a network of walled cities, brick temples, extensive canals, a writing system, statuary and other forms of urban and monumental architecture have already been in place on the Mekong Delta and other parts of Mainland Southeast Asia for a few centuries.

This thesis investigates and defines the material processes underlying this important phase of socio-organizational intensification by identifying and analysing variation and distribution patterns in the production and consumption of both burial and occupation ceramics from three Iron Age mortuary sites in northwestern Cambodia - Phum Sophy (c. AD 87-562), Phum Lovea (c. 3 BC-AD 539) and Prei Khmeng (c. AD 23-623) - through the theoretical lens of the political economy. Patterns derived from these sites are not only compared with burial ceramic typologies from another contemporaneous site of Non Ban Jak (Mortuary Phases 1 and 2) in Thailand (c. AD 220-820), but also interpreted within the broader context of Iron Age socio-organizational intensification across other Mainland Southeast Asian sites for a wider regional perspective. As such, this thesis examines the correlation between these patterns and differential mortuary wealth in order to test its hypothesis: that the political economy - specifically the wealth-finance sector and the inequality it generates - is the primary driver of socio-organizational intensification and change during the Iron Age on Mainland Southeast Asia. In doing so, this thesis not only demonstrates the utility of both ceramic petrography and the chaine operatoire approach in identifying emic and nuanced ceramic typologies in archaeology, but also the capacity and potential of archaeological ceramics in illuminating the social dynamics and mechanisms involved in the evolution of complex societies. Show more