This presentation will address Southeast Asia’s evolutionary international importance c. 500–1500, when the Southeast Asia region became a major source, consumer, and intermediary in the Indian Ocean maritime trade, diplomatic, and knowledge networks prior to significant European contact. Movements of variable goods, ideas, and people through the Southeast Asia extended Indian Ocean maritime passageway, made possible by seasonal monsoon winds, had regional and wider consequence that resulted in new Southeast Asia patterns of networked urbanization, diplomacy, trade, religion, and emigration that intersected and interacted to create a Southeast Asian world that had not previously existed.

This study is focal on Southeast Asia’s initiatives in contrast to prior views that have seen early Southeast Asia societies subject to the external agencies of Chinese, South Asians, and Middle Easterners. In recent years new regional archaeological and shipwreck recoveries have allowed the re-reading of other primary sources, including contemporary epigraphic, chronicle, and fictional literary compositions as these collectively document Southeast Asia’s contributions to the pre-1500 “borderless” Indian Ocean world. In this critical era transitional Southeast Asian societies assumed entrepreneurial roles in the adoption and adaptations of Indian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern concepts and constructions to pre-existing social and economic patterns, from scripts and languages to literary genres and motifs, from religious texts and discourses to associated art and architectural forms, as these were associated with new state, commercial, religious, societal, and urban networking patterns.

Kenneth R. Hall, Professor of History at Ball State University (Indiana, USA), is a Senior Research Fellow in the Nalanda–Sriwijaya Centre at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. He has published a series of monographs and journal articles that address early Southeast Asia and south Indian history, most recently A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, c. 100–1500 (2011); and Networks of Trade, Polity, and Societal Integration in Chola-Era South India, c. 875–1400 (2014); and edited and co-authored Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400–1800 (2008); The Growth of Non-Western Cities: Primary and Secondary Urban Networking, c. 900–1900 (2011); New Perspectives in the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia (2011); and Structural Change and Societal Integration in Early South India (2001/2005).

He is on the advisory board of The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar/Professor of comparative religion at Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia (2003–2004) and Southeast Asian studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (2012).

Southeast Asia contains some of the earliest art known to the planet. Recently dated sites indicate cave/rock art was produced 35–40,000 years ago. Southeast Asia has a widespread and longstanding tradition of cave/rock art extending to the present. Nevertheless, relations among sites and the people who produced the art remain obscure and tenuous. Meanings and purposes are equally ambiguous. Many sites frequently depict animals and humans. Analyzed correctly, however, this reveals information about past cultures, practices, environment and ecology. Subsequently, this helps elucidate clues to assist a greater understanding of past industries and supply-chain networks.

The Kanam cave art site, researched in Jan 2015, depicts an abundance of elephants, humans and deer. The dates of the paintings and site use remain unknown, but it very well may relate to elephant capturing, training and deer hunting industries. The results of the research were recently presented at the IFRAO Conference held in Careres, Spain (31 Aug–4 Sep: “Symbols in the Landscape: Rock Art and its Context”). Fieldwork, methodology, results and implications will be discussed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr D. Kyle Latinis, Visiting Fellow at the NSC, currently researches the Historical Ecology of Southeast Asia—an approach which combines ethnographic, historic and archaeological data to examine long term human-environment trends, inclusive of internal and external socio-economic factors and resource exploitation. He will also assist with projects and field training in Mainland Southeast Asia, having over 20 years of experience in Cambodia. Dr Latinis earned a PhD at the National University of Singapore, Department of Southeast Asian Studies (2008) and a PhD in Ecological Anthropology at the University of Hawaii, Department of Anthropology (1999). Recently, he was a Director and Senior Social Scientist with the US Department of Defense (2011–2014; including 18 months of applied research in Afghanistan), and Dean of Graduate Studies and Social Sciences at the University of Cambodia (2009–2011). Previous fieldwork and research throughout the 1990s and early 2000s focused on east Indonesia (Maluku, Papua Barat, Sulawesi) and proximate areas in the Pacific.

He has also participated in several Singapore heritage projects since 1995 where he first worked with Prof John Miksic at the Fort Canning and Empress Place archaeological sites. His most recent (2014) research publication is: “The Social and Ecological Trajectory of Prehistoric Cambodian Earthworks” Asian Perspectives, 52(2):327–346.

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