Southeast Asian urbanism: from early city to Classical state

MIRIAM T. STARK

When the Portuguese admiral Alfonso de Albuquerque conquered the sul­tanate of Melaka (Malacca) on August 24,1511, he brought under Portuguese control a Southeast Asian polity whose reach stretched across the Malay Peninsula.

It is this earlier heritage of Southeast Asian urbanism, and the role of the urban form in promoting and maintaining polity in first-second millennium Southeast Asia, that forms the focus of this chapter. Polity, power, and urbanism were linked in most regions of Southeast Asia, although the timing and nature of urbanization varied greatly across the region. While mainland Southeast Asians built large fortified urban centers, the densely populated island of Java remained largely free of cities until the thirteenth century ce. Disagreement over when the region's cities first appeared and the forms they took constitute the core of most debates on early Southeast Asian cities. Relatively few scholars, however, have queried the relationship

between early Southeast Asian urbanism, ceremonial power, and perform­ance. This lack of research is puzzling, given Chinese accounts of thirteenth­century royal display and pageantry in Angkor, and nineteenth-century accounts of royal collective suicide in response to Dutch militarism in the Balinese states that we associate most closely with Geertz's model of the theater state.^[60]

This dearth is made more puzzling by the wealth of performance-oriented iconography on Indic-influenced bas-reliefs that decorate ninth- through fourteenth-century public architecture from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Java.

My goal in this chapter is to review the timing and nature of Southeast Asia's earliest urbanism, to trace changes in form from the first millennium ce to the second millennium ce (and the Classical period from the ninth to fourteenth centuries ce), and to examine some ways in which Southeast Asia's early urban tradition was intimately tied to ritual practice and political performance. Early Southeast Asian cities were exemplary centers that shared key structural features, reflecting pan-regional systems that popula­tions materialized through construction and ritual practice. Most mainland Southeast Asian states had ceremonial centers^[61] that also served political, economic, and social functions (island Southeast Asian states urbanized later, and in different forms). Central to the first millennium ce ideological system was a kind of Sanskrit cosmopolitanism, but a growing body of archaeological research identifies regionalization in urban form that distinguished even the earliest Southeast Asian cities from their South Asian counterparts. That early Southeast Asian cities served as templates for the region's later Classical cities in organization, elite structure, and ideological underpinnings is clear in developments over a 1,500-year period in the Khmer region of the lower Mekong Basin.

The chapter begins by addressing methodological concerns and context­ualizing urban trajectories in the first and second millennia ce by focusing on mainland Southeast Asia for the first millennium ce (where such settle­ment has been documented). General patterns in Southeast Asian urban morphology and function are reviewed. Discussion then turns to the lower Mekong Basin as a case study for investigating long-term patterns in urban­ization and the performance of power.

Nature of data sources

Until quite recently, archaeologists have played a minor role in studying the gap between Southeast Asia's prehistoric and Classical past, in large part because most available information was epigraphic or documentary, and also because of a regional archaeological paradigm that privileged metal-age archaeological research. Yet it is precisely within this “gap” that the region's earliest centers developed, and sparse data sources are a problem. Han Chinese annals provide our earliest glimpses of Southeast Asians, as the Chinese conquered northern Vietnam in in bce and converted the region into China's southernmost commandery. Their military campaigns south of the Hanoi region failed repeatedly; Chinese accounts of myriad diplomatic missions with various Southeast Asian polities describe a series of kingdoms and urban centers along coasts and river valleys. Most documentary-driven research on Chinese sources displays a bias toward China as catalyst for Southeast Asia's developments; counterbalancing this China bias is a South Asian bias in art historical research on associated statuary and architecture.

Research on the Early Modern period (that is, 1500-1850 ce) reveals that Southeast Asians nurtured a wide array of historical traditions, recorded in epics, court chronicles, music, and drama, and historical analysis of such indigenous sources sheds light on culture, society, and polity. That first millennium ce Southeast Asians were also literate is suggested by Chinese emissaries who describe libraries of texts.

Southeast Asia views these sites as cultural patrimony and sources of tourism revenue. Today this work is published primarily in vernacular languages, concentrates on the second millennium (at the expense of the first millennium), and consists largely of technical reports on restoration/ preservation rather than problem-driven research.

Early urbanism in Southeast Asia: c. 500 BCE-500 ce

In mainland Southeast Asia, urbanization began in the period associated with either the Iron Age or the Early Historic period; most scholars associate these changes with the embrace of Brahmanization or “Sanskritization'” from the Gangetic Plain of northeast India. By this time, Southeast Asians had established a tradition of what must be considered small urban states (Map 4.1): across the region, hydraulic works encircled large communities with thick earthen ramparts on whose exterior flanks were moats, connected to nearby waterways. Often constructed in more arid sections of the region's monsoon tropics, these moated settlements provided water during the annual dry season, and defense from outside elements. These early “urban” sites have been the focus of most work; recently, however, archaeologists have begun to document what are quite substantial hinterlands or countrysides that developed in concert with, and surrounded, these large settlements.

Within 500 years, such settlements grew exponentially in size. Ramparts surrounding the site of Co Loa (northern Vietnam), for example, encased an area of 600 hectares, or nearly 200 times the area of settlements associated with preceding Bronze Age settlements there.^[62] The contemporary moated and walled site of Angkor Borei (southern Cambodia) encircles a 300-hectare area, and was linked to a series of settlements into the southern Mekong Delta to the site of Oc Eo; this delta-wide system moved goods into the South China Sea maritime trade network and into the lower Mekong Basin.

Form

Southeast Asian archaeologists describe these nucleated settlements as urban, and they appeared both on the coasts and in river networks; their inhabitants engaged in trade and agriculture. Regrettably the city-states of insular Southeast Asia have left a faint archaeological signature and offer little direct evidence of urban morphology. From the Dry Zone of Myanmar

Map 4. i Early urbanization in Southeast Asia: sites and Chinese toponyms

c. 500 BCE-500 ce (adapted from Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Archaeology of the

Early Maritime Polities of Southeast Asia,” in Peter Bellwood and Ian C. Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History [London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004], pp. 282-313.). to northern Vietnam, in contrast, mainland Southeast Asian urban centers have yielded architectural, sculptural, and artifactual remains that reflect a blend of social and religious concepts from neighboring cultures with an indigenous substrate.

Hermann Kulke's review^[63] of first millennium epigraphic materials from insular Southeast Asian city-states offers a concentric urban model that shaped most Southeast Asian settlements.^[64] Seventh- through eleventh­century Srivijaya, for example, had an inner core region under direct authority of the ruler, which included the ruler's residence (kaduatan or kraton), religious buildings, and a surrounding residential area of followers (puri or bhumi). Beyond that lay a ring of tributary states (nusantara) and then other countries (desantara) that later might be absorbed into the state.

The capital served as the political center and centripetal force of the early Southeast Asian state. First millennium settlements varied based on local topographic and hydrological features, and have been described previously; they shared the following structural traits:

1. Encircling wall and moat complex (earthen or brick wall; always outside [sometimes with additional interior moat]): moat generally linked to drainage system, and complex as single or multiple occurrence.

2. Brick ritual monuments (may be moat-mound complexes).

3. Central elite walled core (may be called “palace”), which housed the ruler and his retinue.

4. Mortuary areas.

5. Residential areas.

Figure 4.1 represents the southern Cambodian archaeological site of Angkor Borei (dated c. 500 BCE-500 ce). This large urban site is characteristic of the Early Historic period, with its encircling wall and moat complex, a scattering of collapsed brick monuments in its northeast and central sectors, a central elite core (labeled as Wat Komnou), and surrounding residential areas.

Function

That these urban centers served economic functions seems clear, although no archaeological work has yet focused on marketplaces or warehouses. And that they were political/administrative centers is also evident, based on

Figure 4.1 Archaeological site of Angkor Borei (Takeo Province, Cambodia) as example of early urban form.

settlement size, the co-occurrence of monumental architecture, and the range of non-utilitarian goods recovered through excavations. Most relevant here is their role as ritual centers. Few regional surveys have studied first millennium ce centers. Such work indicates that, within a broader ritual landscape, these centers housed higher densities of ritual architecture per unit area and larger numbers of religious statuary than that found in surrounding settlements. At least in some centers like Angkor Borei, evi­dence from the non-utilitarian ceramic assemblage suggests centralized public ritual rather than simply residence as at surrounding settlements. These urban centers thus housed religious complexes (temples and associ­ated water features) and served as the locus of communal rituals. By the seventh and eighth centuries ce, rulers in these capitals consecrated monu­ments and held audiences with followers on a regular basis.^[65]

Early Southeast Asian urban origins

Most early scholars working in mainland Southeast Asia wrote from an unavoidably regionalist bias that emphasized either the role of China or India in shaping early Southeast Asian cities, or the importance of Chinese documentary data. More recent approaches offer more regionally appropri­ate models to understand first millennium ce centers. Economic-based frameworks either contrast urban forms based on their role as redistribution centers (for example, Miksic's orthogenetic vs. heterogenetic paradigm^[66]) or their emergence and operation as part of maritime trade networks.^[67] The more materialist models of urbanism and of political organization empha­size economic functions over ideology, including iconographic practices and the construction of religious monuments.^[68] Such approaches ignore a range of models that emphasize ideology and power as interlocked forces shaping early states at their own peril. First millennium elites across Southeast Asia

Map 4.2 Ninth- to fifteenth-century urbanized states in Southeast Asia.

Table 4.1 Early Southeast Asian states with large urban centers

Note: Date ranges from Pamela Gutman and Bob Hudson, “The Archaeology of Burma (Myanmar) from the Neolithic to Pagan,” in Peter Bellwood and Ian C. Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004_, pp. 149-76; John N. Miksic, “The Classical Cultures of Indonesia,” in Bellwood and Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia, pp. 234-56; and William A. Southworth, “The Coastal States of Champa,” in Bellwood and Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia, pp. 209-33.

inscribed power through ritual performance that linked their actions and their spiritual essence to the Hindu gods they worshipped, and these gods lived in their urban centers.

Urbanism in Southeast Asia: c. 800-1400 ce

Southeast Asians did not abandon many of their first millennium ce centers, but they turned elsewhere to build their second millennium ce capitals (Map 4.2). Societies in what is now Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar moved their centers northward to found Tai, Khmer, and Burmese capitals at confluences of drainage and transportation systems; states associated with these urban centers are listed in Table 4.1. Dai Viet arose in the northern part of Vietnam, while Champa flourished in the country's center. And major states arose in the arable plains of Sumatra, Java, and Sulawesi; Java's Majapahit kingdom reigned supreme. I present here only a review of ninth- through fifteenth-century Southeast Asian cities; syntheses on this time period are available elsewhere.¹¹

See G. C. Bentley, “Indigenous States of Southeast Asia', Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1996), 275-305; Jan Wisseman Christie, “State Formation in Early Maritime South­east Asia: A Consideration of the Theories and the Data,” Bijdragen Tot De Taal-, Land­en Volkenkunde 151 (1995), 235-88; Pierre-Yves Manguin, “Les cites-Etats de l'Asie du Sud-Est ∞tiere: de l'anciennete et de la permanence des formes urbaines,” Bulletin de TEcole Francaise d’Extreme Orient 87 (2000), 151-82; John N. Miksic, “The Classical Cultures of Indonesia,” in Peter Bellwood and Ian C. Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), pp. 234-56.

Form

Each of these “Classical States” had an indigenous literary tradition, a penchant for monumentalism in either Hindu or Buddhist form, and a commitment to constructing large, walled urban centers with well-defined arteries stretching from the capital to secondary centers throughout each polity's realm. The orthogonal urban design of some Classical centers blended Indic cosmological principles and underlying animist beliefs, and many scholars argue that urban centers echoed ritual temples in form and structure.^{[69] [70]} Rulers lived in these urban centers, and change in rulers gener­ally entailed a change in location of the polity center. Whether all cities were considered “royal” (and thus subject to dictates of geomancy) remains unclear, but some of the better-studied ninth- to fourteenth-century urban plans may reflect Indian cosmological (and modular) principles of urban planning that were articulated in the fourth-century Arthasastra (by Kautilya) and collectively as part of the vastru shastas.¹

First and second millennium ce Chinese sources describe royal, elite, and common residences in wooden (and thus perishable) form whose as yet unexcavated middens offer the only hope for study. Most work has concen­trated instead on mortuary and religious monuments of brick, stone, and laterite, which survived centuries of subsequent conquest and colonization and which are now the object of intensive historic preservation. Like their first millennium ce predecessors, these second millennium urban centers were walled and moated, contained well-defined administrative and reli­gious districts, and served as ritual and political centers for an ever expanding rural elite. Not only does the proliferation of archaeological sites surrounding these centers suggest a well-developed core-hinterland system. Indigenous court chronicles like Java's mid-fourteenth-century ce Nagara- kertagama poem enumerates towns in the Majapahit hinterland; scholars disagree over the nature of such regions vis-a-vis their urban centers.^[71]

Function

Scholars vary in the functions that they assign to ninth- to fourteenth­century Southeast Asian cities. At one end of the continuum are those who call these ritual administrative centers, and at the other are scholars who emphasize instead their economic roles in broader world systems. This interpretive variability reflects the research emphasis of the scholar (for example, art history vs. economic history), the nature of the database under study (architecture, statuary and art, ceramics, settlement pattern), and the relative importance of international trade with China at any point in the sequence; for example, the Song and Yuan dynasties involved more active commerce with Southeast Asia than did portions of the succeeding Ming dynasty. An increasing research corpus suggests that these Southeast Asian cities varied in emphasis depending on location and access to foreign trade, but served the full range of economic, social, political, and religious func­tions as had their first millennium ce predecessors.

Interpretations

Some consensus exists not that most Classical cities in mainland Southeast Asia served multiple functions but that they formed the ritual/ceremonial core of their respective polities; a complementary pattern along island Southeast Asia's coasts were trade-based maritime polities whose size ranged from small chiefdoms to huge cities like Melaka and Makassar. Individual cities in these coastal regions rose and fell under successive raids and attacks, but the notion of “city” remained and inhabitants quickly rebuilt on ground where the razed cities once stood. In contrast, most Classical mainland cities dissolved by the late fifteenth century, the victims of shifting economic conditions as much as war. Some capitals moved south to take advantage of coastlines and the maritime trade relationships that coastal access afforded to the polities. Others fell under attack from neighboring polities. New urban centers that arose at this time, and the secondary centers whose linkages joined the capital to a broader system, were organ­ized around most of the same principles. One substantial change lay in the addition of ethnic enclaves, often (but not always) to accommodate overseas Chinese, whose flight from the new Qing dynasty built widespread cultural and commercial networks that integrated Southeast Asia and South China into a single economic system. Sixteenth-century Europeans who came to Southeast Asia entered a world of commerce and urbanism that rivaled or exceeded parts of their home civilization in scale; what they couldn't see, and only understood centuries later, was how performance and power combined to build this urban tradition.

Performance and the Southeast Asian polity

From their earliest first millennium incarnations onward, the centripetal power of mainland Southeast Asian cities lay partly in their importance as venues for performance: ritual or secular, but public. Innumerable foreign­ers (Chinese, European, Arab) described pageantry and spectacle in the city capitals that involved rulers and their entourages and elite-sponsored events, from temple inaugurations and rededications to processionals and animal­fighting contests (particularly cock-fighting and pig-fighting), and from annual public prognostication events to state-sponsored funerals that memorialized fallen leaders and reinforced a sense of nationhood.

Ritual, performance, and power were intrinsic to most Southeast Asian cultures, writ small or large. Within the region's tribal societies, ritual special­ists performed rites that allow them access to spirits who have the ability to right the situation. Sixteenth-century Spanish so feared the power of female babaylan or catalonan in the Philippines that they undertook wide-scale exter­mination.^[72] Ritual specialists played yet more integral roles in the region's state-level societies, particularly the Saivite Brahmin priests. By the thirteenth century in Angkor and Majapahit, court-based Brahmins were key propagators of rituals of kingship; as royal advisors, they directed court rituals and adminis­trated statewide religious observances necessary to maintain power and stability on annual and periodic cycles. In Theravada Buddhist Cambodia and Thailand today, Brahmins remain integral to royal administrative affairs.

Khmer rulers' power depended on their successful performance of secular and sacred ritual (for example, consecration ceremonies, annual festivals, and inauguration events), statecraft (audiences with subjects and judicial activities^[73]) and - for many Southeast Asian rulers - through militarism. These intimate links between ritual performance and power in Southeast

Asia are forcefully illustrated in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bali, through suttee associated with royal cremation ceremonies and an analysis of puputan (ritualized, dynasty-ending defeat by Balinese royalty) as Balinese royalty capitulated their thrones to the Dutch colonizers. Clifford Geertz noted that rulers were both political actors and ritual objects, but empha­sized the shallow power that such rulers held.^[74] That intimate links have a deep history is clear in the following brief description of performance, power, and place in the history of the lower Mekong Basin, in what is now the kingdom of Cambodia. So too, however, is a close linkage between performance and genuine political power that Geertz, in his analysis of the nineteenth-century Balinese, minimized.

Power, place, and ritual in the lower Mekong Basin as case study

The lower Mekong Basin today includes Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam; at the peak of the Angkorian Empire in the thirteenth century, this entire region was under control of the Khmer center in the Tonle Sap region that we now gloss as “Angkor.” Indigenous histories that Chinese emissaries recorded in the first millennium ce, supplemented by the eleventh­century Khmer Sdok Kak Thom inscription, suggest that the roots of the Khmer Empire lay in southern Cambodia and the Mekong Delta, that political power moved to central Cambodia by the sixth-eighth centuries ce, and that the Angkorian capital was first established in 802 ce on the banks of the Tonle Sap lake. As the tempo of historical archaeological research increases in Cambodia and its environs, this reconstruction may require revision to incorporate multiple “centers” of Khmer culture. Nevertheless, systematic research in these three regions offers some insights concerning how ritual and power combined to legitimize Cambodia's earliest rulers, and why the central places that they favored became the civilization's earliest urban centers.

The Lower Mekongfrom 500 bce to 800 ce

The Mekong Delta

Archaeological research suggests that by the mid-first millennium ce, canals and waterways connected nodes in a Mekong delta settlement system that contained villages, religious-administrative centers, agricultural regions, and sacred hills. Settlements were located at the edges of the floodplain, where inhabitants could maximize their farming yields through rain-fed and flood­water farming. Ancient settlement also surrounded each of the few hills in the region and each hill houses ritual structures, suggesting that Khmer cosmological beliefs concerning mountains have a pre-Angkorian basis. The modal archaeological signature is one or more mounds, surrounded by water features like moats or ponds. Some mounds contain fragmentary brick masonry and stone architectural elements that would have functioned as entryways or pedestals. Large settlements, signaled by dense and deep ceramic deposits, are much less common, and contain one or more areas with vestiges of brick ritual structures.

No indigenous records for this culture survive from its first five or more centuries; the first dated inscribed stela derives from the Angkor Borei site and dates to 6ιι ce. Third- and sixth-century Chinese emissaries who visited the delta, however, left extensive documentation of this polity they called ''Funan.'' Their accounts not only record diplomatic missions and the goods that moved in both directions; such accounts also described the urban core, political-administrative structure, origins, and dynastic succession of this polity. This Chinese literary corpus combined with comparative analysis of seventh- and eighth-century Khmer and Sanskrit epigraphic data depicts a stratified society. At the top were rulers whom the Chinese described as “kings”; below them were one or more levels of indigenous elites, listed in the inscriptions using local terms, who may have been provincial- and district-level administrators (as prescribed by Indian texts).

Funan sovereigns allegedly built elite residences in urban centers to house their entourages and segregate space. They directed the construction of public works in and radiating out from the polity's center, including walls, reservoirs, ritual buildings, and canal and transportation systems that repre­sented the collective. Chinese annals describe Funan military expeditions as far west as the Malay Peninsula to found tributary or diplomatic relation­ships. They clearly monopolized control of economic resources and negoti­ated with visiting foreign traders and Brahmins who came on the monsoon winds from the Indian Ocean and East China Sea. Rulers practiced public rituals and embraced religious symbolism to bolster political action. Dense deposits of ritual vessels at Angkor Borei suggest the support of religious festivals to draw residents from surrounding areas to these centers to worship communally; whether populations observed the rulers' power through ritual performance cannot be proven.

Social stratification in this first millennium ce society reached below the ruler to provincial and district levels, where inscriptions indicate that local elites used ritual to establish their power. They merged Hindu statecraft ideologies with traditional animist beliefs to found their capitals in sacred locations as ritual administrative centers that they sanctified through the construction of ritual structures (shrines and temples). State capitals and ritual centers had deep histories of ancestral spirits, and involved key points in agrarian landscapes; some remain sacred to Khmers today. Shrines housed statuary that represented deities from the Saivite and Vaishnavite cults; each required resources to dedicate and maintain the structures, and at least the temples required ritual specialists who conducted ceremonies on a regular basis.

Chenla? c. 500-800 ce

No systematic survey-based archaeological work has yet been published on sixth- to eighth-century urbanism in its putative pre-Angkorian core (that is, central and northern Cambodia). Chinese emissaries trace the movement of the Khmer ''Chenla'' capital northward during this period, and multiple large centers have been documented in Kampong Thom and Stung Treng Province. Sites like Sambor Prei Kuk had dozens of brick temples whose statuary has long disappeared, but whose extant inscriptions describe a melange of cults; statuary reflects these heterogeneous influences. These inscriptions, coupled with Chinese accounts, describe Khmer rulers who established large political-religious centers or “temple-cities” to accommo­date competing cults that their followers practiced, sponsored the operation of these temples, and encouraged the development of state-level artistic traditions (particularly architectural) that have been found across the entire geographic domain that scholars associate with the pre-Angkorian world.

“Angkor” and northwestern Cambodia: c. 800-1432 ce

For more than a century of scholars have sought to understand the devel­opment and forms of the succeeding Khmer Empire, which its rulers made legible in the early ninth century ce. Yet this burden of architectural, art historical, and epigraphic data has prevented all but the hardiest scholars from investigating Angkorian urbanism through the archaeological record, and most have done so only recently. The earliest urban expression in the Angkorian period emerged in the ninth century ce through the construction of royal capitals and their increasingly large, associated hydraulic features. As the literature on Angkorian urbanism grows, so too grows the volume of disputation between key researchers. All scholars agree, however, that Angkorian urbanism was a case of “conurbation”: at every point in the sequence, an Angkorian ritual-administrative core contained water features and temples, was ringed by an associated settlement zone, and may have been surrounded further by a periurban or suburban perimeter.

The urban organization of only one well-defined “city” in the Angkorian complex has been systematically studied thus far: that of Angkor Thom, created by the Khmer Empire's last great ruler, Jayavarman VII, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In sum, such work suggests that Angkor Thom followed Indian cosmological and urban precepts in its gridded form and spatial organization, that the city's four quarters included a religious center (the Bayon) and a royal quarter to the northeast, and that it was further organized through linear canals into smaller units, most of which contained what might be household clusters. That Indian cosmo­logical concepts guided Khmer (and Southeast Asian) construction at the architectural level is abundantly clear and the subject of innumerable art historical and architectural treatises; whether such concepts and Indian texts also guided urban planning also seems likely.

Performance, and particularly public performance, was fundamental to royal authority, but Angkorian rulers blended display with political, economic, and military acumen to succeed as heads of state. Each new Khmer ruler constructed a new capital around the Tonle Sap; each new capital required the erection and consecration of a central religious monument to memorialize a deceased royal relative through whose lineage the new ruler sought legitimation.

From their central location, Khmer rulers sponsored and institutionalized practices associated with state religion to merge “church” and state. Shared ideological traditions were materialized in state-level iconography in architec­tural decoration and statuary, whose redundant expression in provincial archi­tecture and statuary underscored the importance of the urban core. Temples in the core zone were adorned with bas-reliefs that celebrated military victories and recounted Hindu origins through scenes from the Ramayana epic.

Performing power required work within and beyond the urban state core. The strongest Khmer kings built road and transportation networks to link provincial areas to the Angkorian capital and economize the movement of tribute to the center. Rulers also awarded lands to provincial elite and for temple and ashram construction to accommodate a special class of religious elite whose practices were integral to the health of the polity. Jayavarman VII undergirded his claim to imperial power most vigorously in this regard: his temples, hospitals, resthouses, bridges, and roads knitted much of what are today northeastern Thailand, southern Laos, and southern Cambodia into an imperial system through which goods and people circulated.

The most successful of the Khmer kings practiced power through regular performance. They engaged in royal ceremonies and processions (which thirteenth-century Chinese visitors like Zhou Daguan described) and pil­grimages to heritage sites.^[75] These events made full use of long promenades, causeways, and “avenues of approaches” in Angkorian period public archi­tecture, and involved thousands of people. But participation in daily rituals, some originating in Vedic sacrifices, to essential deities were also integral aspects of rulership.^[76] Khmer rulers inscribed their power into politico­religious monuments and made their settlements central through practice.

Conclusions

Urbanism has a deep history in Southeast Asia; from its inception, such Southeast Asian statecraft has been forged through a mixture of power, ceremonialism, and performance. Such a blend, while volatile, often carried real power (contra Geertz's [1980] example of colonial Bali) that sustained Southeast Asian states for generations and centuries. Urbanism in the ancient Khmer state exemplifies these relationships rather clearly: the Khmer state and its Angkorian urban forms exceeded its peers in geographic scale (if not also in administrative power), but emerging studies of the region's other Classical Hindu and Buddhist polities, like Bagan/Pagan (Myanmar) and Trowulan (Java) offer similar patterns.

As Gaucher and Miksic^[77] note in their case studies of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Cambodia and Java, Southeast Asians blended Indic and indigenous ideas into their localized urban forms. Political power involved performance and entailed concrete results; cities formed the core for the Centripetality that structured Southeast Asians' settlement systems. One might argue, further, that underlying the Classical Southeast Asian city was a “modular” notion of settlement (with a ritual epicenter with hydraulic features, a residential halo, and surrounding agrarian lands dotted with shrines) whose roots lay in a pre-Indic landscape peopled by ancestral spirits and their human-crafted homes that were objects of veneration. From northwestern Cambodia to central Java, ninth- through fourteenth-century Southeast Asian rulers forged and sustained their exemplary centers through practice at the court, capital, and cosmopolitan levels.

18

19

20

FURTHER READINGS

Bulbeck, David, and Ian Caldwell, “Oryza Sativa and the Origins of Kingdoms in South Sulawesi, Indonesia: Evidence from Rice Husk Phytoliths,” Indonesia and the Malay World 36 (2008), 1-20.

Christie, Jan Wisseman, “State Formation in Early Maritime Southeast Asia: A Consideration of the Theories and the Data,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 151 (1995), 235-88.

“States without Cities: Demographic Trends in early Java,” Indonesia 52 (1991), 23-40 Coedes, George, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, W. F. Vella (ed.), S. B. Cowing, (trans.), Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968.

Cummings, Williams, “Historical Texts as Social Maps: Lontaraq bilang in Early Modern Makassar,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 161 (2005), 40-62.

Eisenstadt, S. N., “Religious Organizations and Political Process in Centralized Empires,” The Journal of Asian Studies 21 (1962), 271-94.

Evans, Damian, Christophe Pottier, Roland Fletcher, Scott Hensley, Ian Tapley, Anthony Milne, and Michael Barbetti “A Comprehensive Archaeological Map of the World's Largest Preindustrial Settlement Complex at Angkor, Cambodia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 104 (2007), 14,277-82.

Hudson, Bob, “The Origins of Bagan: The Archaeological Landscape of Upper Burma to AD 1300,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sydney, 2004.

Jacques, Claude, “Le pays Khmer avant Angkor,” Journal des Savants ι (1986), 59-95.

Jacques, Claude, and Pierre Lafond, The Khmer Empire: Cities and Sanctuaries, Fifth to Thirteenth Centuries, Bangkok: River Books, 2007.

Junker, Laura Lee, “Population Dynamics and Urbanism in Premodern Island Southeast Asia,” in Glenn R. Storey (ed.), Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-Cultural Approaches, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006, pp. 211-14.

Lavy, Paul A., “As in Heaven, So on Earth: The Politics of Visnu, Siva and Harihara Images in Preangkorian Khmer Civilisation,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (2003), 21-39. Malleret, Louis, LArcheologie du Delta du Mekong, Paris: Publication de FEcole Francaise d'Extreme Orient, 1959-1963, Vols. I-III.

Manguin, Pierre-Yves, “The Archaeology of the Early Maritime Polities of Southeast Asia,” in Peter Bellwood and Ian C. Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, pp. 282-313.

“City-states and City-state Cultures in Pre-15th-century Southeast Asia,” in Mogens H. Hansen (ed.), A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures, Copenhagen: Reitzels Forlag, 2000, pp. 409-16.

“Les cites-Etats de l'Asie du Sud-Est ∞tiere: de Lanciennete et de la permanence des formes urbaines,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient 87 (2000), 151-82.

“Southeast Sumatra in Protohistoric and Srivijaya Times: Upstream-Downstream Relations and the Settlement of the Peneplain,” in Dominik Bonatz, John N. Miksic, J. David Neideland, and Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz (eds.), From Distant Tales: Archaeology and Ethnohistory in the Highlands of Sumatra, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp. 434-84.

Miksic, John N., “The Classical Cultures of Indonesia,” in Peter Bellwood and Ian C. Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, New York: RoutledgeCur- zon, 2004, pp. 234-56.

“Heterogenetic Cities in Premodern Southeast Asia,” World Archaeology 32 (2000), 106-20.

Moore, Elizabeth, and San Win, “The Gold Coast: Suvannabhumi? Lower Myanmar Walled Sites of the First Millennium A.D.,” Asian Perspectives 46 (2007), 202-32.

Mudar, Karen M., “How Many Dvaravati Kingdoms? Locational Analysis of First Millen­nium AD Moated Settlements in Central Thailand,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 18 (1999), 1-28.

Pelliot, Paul, “Le Fou-nan,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme Orient 3 (1903), 248-303.

Pollock, Sheldon, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Stargardt, Janice, The Ancient Pyu of Burma, Vol. i: Early Pyu Cities in a Man-made Landscape, Cambridge: Publications on Ancient Civilization, Institute of Southeast Asian Stud­ies, 1990.

Stark, Miriam T., “Pre-Angkorian and Angkorian Cambodia,” in Peter Bellwood and Ian C. Glover (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, New York: Routledge- Curzon, 2004, pp. 89-119.

“Pre-Angkorian Settlement Trends in Cambodia’s Mekong Delta and the Lower Mekong Archaeological Project,” Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 26 (2006), 98-109.

“Southeast Asia Late Prehistoric: 2500-1500BP,” in Peter Peregrine (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prehistory, New York: Plenum Press, 2001, Vol. ιιι, pp. 160-205,

Vickery, Michael, “Funan Reviewed: Deconstructing the Ancients,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient 90 (2003), 101-43.

Society, Economics, and Politics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia: The 7th-8th Centuries, Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for UNESCO, The Tokyo Bunko, 1998.

Wheatley, Paul, Nagara and Commandery: Origins of the Southeast Asian Urban Traditions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.