Conclusion
The history of early agriculture in MSEA and ISEA defies a simple summary. Within each region there are complex flows of materials, people, and ideas. It certainly does not make sense to speak of the Neolithic across the entire region.
The ways in which people and things have moved about within Southeast Asia appear highly complex. In far southern subtropical China and northern Vietnam, pottery appears to have moved independently of agriculture, while design motifs and styles show similarities between these regions. Stone tools also appear to have their own trajectory, with the early appearance of ground stone axes towards the end of the Pleistocene in northern Vietnam - again in worlds apparently without agriculture. During the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, tropical coastlines of China, northern Vietnam, and southern Thailand may have been home to sedentary and semi-sedentary groups of pottery-using hunter-gatherer-fisher communities. These were peoples who engaged in complex mortuary rights, may have142 Prill-Brett, ‘Bontok', 68. expressed status in their treatment of the dead, and had complex humananimal relationships. Pottery seems to play an important role in burial ritual across the region, being interred in graves as whole pots or smashed, used as primary and secondary burial containers, and at times ornately decorated.
Agriculture in MSEA is normally thought of as the practice of cultivating rice, but again, as the evidence from the Batanes Islands and central Thailand shows, rice appears to be a plant with a complex biography. The most comprehensive analysis of archaeobotanical evidence from the Khao Wang Prachan valley in central Thailand shows that millets rather than rice were the key crop and that rice does not figure as an important cultivar until the mid second millennium bce. Bellwood has claimed that the Austronesian migrants were farmers in every sense of the word, just as proficient with the cultivation of rice as with the cultivation of root crops, tree crops, palms, and bananas.
The nature of vegecultural plant propagation, though, is very different to plant cultivation and shares more in common with huntergatherer systems of in situ plant management than it does with the cleared fields of cereal cultivation. It seems more likely that rice was adopted into vegecultural systems indigenous to MSEA and possibly ISEA rather than being brought into a region as a ‘package' of farming (rice and vegecultural practices) from China. Limited archaeological and palaeoecological data from Sarawak indicate the presence of significant landscape modification by at least 6,500 years ago that includes clearance and burning.[976] This is suggestive of a pre-Austronesian system of landscape management and manipulation, perhaps even of some form of swidden cultivation not too dissimilar to that seen at Kuk Swamp in the highlands of New Guinea from 10,000 years ago.This is a rich region for new archaeological research. While long dominated by a particular view of technological and social change,[977] there seems much potential for new ideas and new approaches. Histories of plant and animal domestication again point to these complexities. The evidence for pig and chicken domestication seems to mirror that of bananas, taros, and yams, suggesting multiple loci of domestication from India and across ISEA. Human movement and translocation appear to have been an important element in the human-plant and human-animal interactions from which domestication has arisen. The nature of vegetative plant manipulation allows for multiple domestication events, as do the vast time depths of human, and indeed of hominin, occupation in this region.
The challenge for researchers of the present and fUture is to abandon long-held ‘classic' terminologies of Mesolithic and Neolithic and of cultures reflected in the stamp of material things and of their languages. Rather than trying to make people fit into entangled concepts like pre-Neolithic pottery-using cultures or pottery-using Neolithic cultures independent of agriculture, or complex hunter-gatherers independent of rice agriculture, we should ignore the contradictions - which are of out own making - and instead explore the diversity for what it is and what it can teach us about the rich complexity of human adaptation in this remarkable part of the world.
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