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Charles Higham, "Early Southeast Asia: From First Humans to First Civilizations" (NUS Press, 2024)
01:03:15
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Patrick Jory
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network. New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is.
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Charles Hyam
Sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute, the Griffith Asia Institute, the New York.
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Marshall Po
Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of.
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Charles Hyam
Asian Studies and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
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Patrick Jory
Welcome back, everyone, to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Patrick Jory. I teach Southeast Asian history at the University of Queensland, Australia, and I'm co host of this channel. In September 2025, the Dutch government announced that it would return to Indonesia the fossilized remains of the famous Java man, the first known example of an early species of human called Homo erectus. The remains have been uncovered by a Dutch archaeologist in the 1890s during the colonial period and taken back to the Netherlands. Southeast Asia has a special place in the history of human revolution. Charles Hyam's Early Southeast Asia from the First Humans to the First Civilizations, jointly published by River Books and Nus Press, covers almost 2 million years of history, from the appearance of the first human species to the flourishing of the civilization of Angkor. Recent discoveries and new dating technologies are revealing remarkable new insights into the region's early history. We're coming to a much better understanding of the chronology of human settlement, the development of socially stratified societies, urbanisation, the expansion of overseas trademark and the rise of the first States today. I'm honoured to be talking to the author of the book, Professor Charles Hyam. Charles is a pioneering figure in the field of Southeast Asian archaeology. He is Emeritus professor of Archaeology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He holds the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to archaeology. He's a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of New Zealand and of St Catherine's College, Cambridge. In 2012, the British Academy awarded him the Graham Clark Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Research. Charles, it's a real honour to speak to you today. Thanks so much for coming on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about your book.
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Charles Hyam
Well, thank you very much for inviting me and it's a pleasure to go into it with you.
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Patrick Jory
Now, you've had a long and distinguished career, especially for students who may be listening, I wanted to ask how and maybe why you first became interested in the archaeology of Southeast Asia.
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Charles Hyam
Well, like so many things in life, you come to crossroads and I'm at a major crossroads. Having finished my PhD in Cambridge University, when I was looking for my first job, I was very anxious to live the life of a professional archaeologist. And my great interest at Cambridge was on the Neolithic Bronze and Iron Ages of Europe. And it was in that particular field that I undertook my doctoral dissertation in Switzerland, which was absolutely marvelous, and in Denmark. And having completed that in 1966, I did in fact apply for a job as a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Birmingham. Now, my PhD was on the prehistoric economies, and that was based very much upon animal bones. I became quite adept at telling whether a bone came from a cow or a horse or a sheep or a goat or a deer, and then identifying on the basis of prehistoric historic faunal remains from prehistoric sites, the sort of subsistence economy that characterized the first farmers through to the advent of the Bronze and Iron Ages in Western Europe. This didn't go down at all well in my interview in Birmingham. In fact, my interview in Birmingham was a disaster. I went to it with an offer of a lectureship from the University of Otago in my pocket and an agreement with my wife that if I failed to to get the job in Birmingham, then we would go around the world and take up the lectureship here in Dunedin, New Zealand, which then seemed probably like life on a different planet. As I say, the interview at Birmingham was a shambles. The interview was chaired by a very unpleasant geologist by the name of Fred Shotten. And I went into the interview and the first thing he said was, chaim, I don't know why you chose such an eccentric PhD topic. And I replied, well, I don't think it's eccentric because. And then he said, but I do. And then he went on riffling through my file in front of him to say, I see you play rugby high. In what position? And I said, I'm a hooker. He said, I thought that was a form of Turkish pipe. Ha ha. Well, the interview was obviously a disaster and I didn't get the job, although most of my colleagues and friends at Cambridge thought I would. And so we came to New Zealand and on arriving in Dunedin in January 1967, it was, of course, actually it was life on a different planet. We felt bitterly homesick for all the things familiar to us, as I think after a five week journey on a ship was justifiable. And we settled down and I was invited by a colleague to look at some animal bones from a site in Thailand called Nonokta. As it happens, it had a lot of specimens that I could identify and I wrote a report on it. And this caught the attention of an American seen as the grand old man of Southeast Asian archaeology by the name of Wilhelm Solheim. Wilhelm Solheim II and I went over in 1968 to Hawaii because by then they suddenly decided that they'd offer me the foundation professorship here in Otago to interview two young graduate students, both of my own age, virtually Don Bayard, who'd excavated Non Noktar, and Chester Gorman, who was excavating, under Bill Solheim's supervision, various sites in northeast Thailand. And to cut a long story short, Bill asked me if I could possibly take on the role of a field director in one of his projects, and I said yes. And in Southeast Asia I found that it was very much to my taste because it had, as in Europe, a similar prehistoric sequence. It had its hunter gatherers and then it had the advent of the Neolithic farmers coming in from somewhere with their rice and millet, though then we didn't know where they came from or how rice came to be domesticated. It had a Bronze Age, as in Europe, and it had an Iron Age. And I found myself very much at home working on parallel material. And it all developed really from there. So that's how it began. It was, as I say, various crossroads. One crossroads was at Birmingham University, from which I turned sharply right, and the next crossroads was arriving in New Zealand and happening to be asked to look at some animal bones that led to my first field season that began in December 1969.
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Patrick Jory
Listeners who haven't seen the book, I have to say it's a beautifully produced book. Congratulations. To the publishers, it's full of pictures and maps and figures which enhance the explanations in the text. You can pick it up, flick through and land on any page and become fascinated with whatever period of history you've landed on. It's a new edition of the book that was published, I think, first published 10 years ago. So can I ask you, what is the book basically about and what is new in this edition?
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Charles Hyam
Well, you're quite right. It is very generously illustrated with color images. There's many hundred. And my colleagues have been very generous in letting me have access to their color illustrations. I did the maps myself. And Nerissa Chakrabong, who is the owner of and founder of River Books, has always been very keen to illustrate her books copiously and properly. I think a picture is worth a thousand words. I was very, very fortunate to meet Nerissa in the first place. And she's done a magnificent job with various publications of mine over the years and of course, for many others. In fact, it's very unusual and rare to find a publisher who sends one email saying, can we have another 20 or 30 color illustrations for this chapter? And usually when it comes to the expensive color pictures, the publisher only grants you a handful of. And most of them ultimately come out in black and white. So what's happening in Southeast Asian prehistory is that it's advancing very, very rapidly, that there are new excavations coming up. When I began with my various American and European and Thai colleagues, frankly, it was an open book. We didn't know anything or very much about Southeast Asian prehistory. In fact, famously, my professor at Cambridge, Sir Graham Clarke, in his first edition of his best selling book, World Prehistory, really summarized Southeast Asia as being a bit of a cul de sac, where nothing happened. Well, of course, a great deal happened, as we're finding out on a monthly and yearly basis. And 10 years is a long time. In the prehistory of Southeast Asia, new discoveries are flooding in. Just as one example, the amazing revelations of the civilization of Angkor that are coming through from Lidar, which are completely transforming our understanding of the structure and the nature of that remarkable early state. And so 10 years, as I say, is a long time. And a lot of accumulated new material had become available. And this, in my view, at least, and thankfully, that of Nerissa and the fine staff in Singapore, necessitated an update. In interpreting prehistoric material, one can make mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes and I made a very serious mistake once in interpreting a site I excavated, a site called cocpanon D in which I was led up the garden path by thinking that perhaps it was occupied more by hunter gatherers than by rice farmers. I realized the error of my ways in as a result of new research and was very happy with a new book came out to put that particular chapter right. And so this is just one example of the way in which the subject advances and where new material comes to hand and needs to be resynthesised.
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Patrick Jory
When I'm doing my day job as a historian of Southeast Asia, I usually cover a period of 50 or 100 years at most. But your book covers a period of about 2 million years. So we've got a lot to get through. In the interview. To start off with, could you tell us about when the first human like species begin to populate Southeast Asia?
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Charles Hyam
Yes. Well, Charles Darwin, of course, was quite right when he said that the origins of the human species would lie in Africa. He said that largely as a result of the obvious close similarity that we humans have with our close cousins, the chimpanzees and the gorillas to a lesser extent. On the other hand, there was also, as you mentioned in your introduction, the important early work in the 19th century, Eugene Dubois in Java in discovering what he called a Homo erectus, or what became known as Homo erectus. And there was another possible source for the origins of the human species lying in Southeast Asia. Well, as research has progressed, we now have a very comprehensive and convincing sequence of human evolution in Africa, involving 5 million years ago, the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, and then working progressively through the the evolution of the Australopithecines until about 1.9 to 2 million years ago, by which time stone tools had been well established in the archaeological record. And there is then compelling evidence for the expansion of early humans, known as Homo habilis and early Homo erectus, out of Africa, a diaspora out of Africa that took them to Georgia, to the site of Dmanisi, and then eastward. Eastward was the right way to go because you were following a good series of migratory corridors and the climate would take you through warm and humid conditions rather than venturing north into where it became colder and less attractive. And so what we find is that early humans, under the name, as I say, of erectus, and possibly Homo habilis too, began to infiltrate into Southeast Asia and East Asia, that's China, from about 2.1 to 1.9 million years ago. Now, we do have a conundrum here that is still largely unresolved, and that's the remarkable discovery of the Tiny human on the island of Flores, Homo floresiensis, known as the Hobbit. It's still very much being weighed up by the specialists, by the experts, but there is just a possibility, I think, that the origins of this little human might have represented an even earlier expansion, as yet archaeologically undocumented, because some of the post cranial bones, some of the limb bones of the Hobbit do in fact look very similar to Homo habilis from East Africa. And so there may have been an even earlier expansion into Southeast Asia that may one day turn up. But this is what happened. Yes, humans began to expand out of Africa at least 2 million years ago and reached east and Southeast Asia pretty early in the piece.
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Patrick Jory
I became fascinated by these Hobbit like creatures. You just mentioned the Homo floresiensis and I think there's another one. Is it Homo luzoniensis in Luzon island who appear, as I understand it, to have lived at the same time as Homo sapiens, our own species, Is that right? And do we know if they interacted with each other?
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Charles Hyam
No, we don't actually have any firm evidence that early modern humans, Homo sapiens, ever became face to face with the Hobbit. It's conceivable because we know so little about the chronology of the later occupation by the hobbit. But I think it's unlikely that they actually encountered each other. I think that the evidence when it comes, would indeed be fascinating, but it's not as yet been proven. And you're quite right, of course. There is another tiny specimen, possibly related to the Harbit, showing that Luzonensis onto the islands of the Philippines also. It penetrated and crossed quite substantial sea barriers before they reached Luzon.
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Patrick Jory
When I was reading about Java Man, I got really interested in this early human species known as Homo erectus. And when we think of our own species, Homo sapiens, we tend to think of ourselves as being very successful. But these guys were incredibly successful. If we look at how long they were around. They, as I understand they seem to have reached southeast Asia about 1.8 million years ago. And it's possible that they could have survived until about 50,000 years ago.
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Charles Hyam
Is that right?
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Patrick Jory
And do we know what made them extinct?
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Charles Hyam
Wouldn't that be nice to have really firm evidence as to what happened to Homo erectus? You're quite right, it is remarkable when you judge it not only in terms of the passage of thousands of years, but also the number of human generations during which they survived quite substantial climatic change in Java and on the mainland of Asia, right up to Beijing. Of course, we have Related specimens of Homo erectus up near Beijing at the site of Zhougo Tien. Yes, they were expanded quite widely and they did survive. We don't actually know the latest, But I think 50,000 is generous. I think it's probably closer to 150,000. It is conceivable, as I say, that they did overlap with expanding anatomically modern humans, and if not, then with the notable new species that has now appeared on the scene known as Denisovans. Because when you look at Denisovan genes and DNA is at the moment turning our prehistory on its head, actually, because one thing you can't really argue, you can't argue with DNA, it's a sort of scientifically well founded, in concrete, some of the results that are coming through. But some Denisovan genes do in fact have a small fraction of an unknown human. That may well be the genes of Homo erectus. So the Denisovans, which we'll doubtless be going into shortly, seem to have overlapped with and cohabited introgression of genes with the Homo erectus.
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Patrick Jory
You mentioned it a minute ago. Climate change, it's one of the big themes of the book, and the book shows very clearly that the climate has been constantly changing, sometimes dramatically. And one of the greatest changes took place, is it 12,000 years ago when the sea levels in Southeast Asia rapidly rose? How did Southeast Asia change at that time?
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Charles Hyam
Yes, indeed, one of the major climatic changes in the recent past has been the dramatic warming of the climate about 12, beginning about 14 to 12,000 years ago, imagine. But then the sea was about 120 meters lower than it is today, and it was possible to walk from New guinea to Tasmania without crossing salt water. And so there's a great deal of archaeology that must have been lost because presumably people were living down there where the, the sea was much lower. And then as the sea level rose, of course they had to move and shift and change what they were living. So there has been then a whole series of huge changes in the habitat, in the climate and where people could live and where they went.
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Patrick Jory
Chapter three deals with what you call anatomically modern humans. When did they first start to move into Southeast Asia and where did they come from?
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Charles Hyam
Once again, one has to go back to Africa, in this case Morocco, where recent archaeological research, various cave sites, have identified skulls that look very like our own of the modern, what we call anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. And these date back now to about 300 to 320,000 years ago, which is really much earlier than was previously thought. Moving across North Africa and indeed further south into Africa, we find related developments increasingly showing humans more and more like us. And then once again there was a movement out of Africa. One of the earliest actually went to a cave in southern Greece at about 200,000 years ago. But a movement out of Africa needn't have been permanent and needn't have been successful. There may have been lots of moves in and out and back, but what we can do now, again because of the ameliorating climate. Imagine Saudi Arabia then wasn't desert, but it was more of an open grassland with flowing rivers and a much milder climate than today attracted human expansion. Now there is again it get two archaeologists or three into a room and you'll never find fast agreement. And there is debate over when the first anatomically modern humans began to move across Eurasia into our part of the world of Southeast Asia. It's certainly by 50 to 60,000 years ago that the first humans were penetrating our region. And if you take some of the more recent claims, it may have been even earlier. It might have been going back 120, 130,000 years ago. And on arrival, they would almost certainly, as I said earlier, have encountered humans living here, living there already, perhaps even Homo erectus and the hobbit. And they certainly based upon DNA and came across the mysterious, and we must go into this shortly, the mysterious and little known new human species known as Denisov, because the people living today in New guinea and in parts of the Philippines and in Australia do have a small fraction of Denisovan genes. And so there must have been introgression and meeting between two different humans in Southeast Asia. So it's probably in the vicinity of 100 to 120,000 years that the first anatomically modern humans began to penetrate into east and Southeast Asia. And when they did so, they brought with them a whole new way of living. They brought with them, for example, the first world's first, now that we have it, it actually features on the front cover of my book, the earliest art, far earlier than on the famous Upper Palaeolithic art of Europe, in which people were painting incredible scenes of water buffalo being hunted by men with birds heads and long spears in Sulawesi in Indonesia. So they brought with them a whole new way of life. And they were certainly able to build boats, probably on the basis of the very, very malleable and tough bamboo, which of course can bend and strain without breaking. And so with bamboo based crafts, probably because no one's ever found a boat that might have been used, they intrepidly crossed into Australia. There are claims that the first humans reached Australia by 60 or so thousand years ago, but certainly by 50. And imagine what it must have been like crossing over into Australia then and meeting thick mangroves and alligators and marsupials the size of rhinoceros, the famous dipradon, and birds that looked at you from a height of about 2 meters and then ran with incredible pace perhaps towards you rather than away from. Must have been quite a terrifying experience, particularly when you consider all the other nefarious and poisonous insects and snakes that seem to inhabit Australia. So these people were amazing what they did. And tracing them has been one of the great achievements of Australian archaeologists over the last 50 years. I think, in particular, for example, of my very good friend Rhys Jones, who was at Anu until his untimely death some years ago now, who went to conferences on virtually an annual basis and on each occasion said that we're now pushing the occupation of Australia even further back than we thought. When I arrived in New Zealand, it was thought that the first humans to reach Australia would have been about 10,000 years ago. It's now closer to 60.
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Patrick Jory
It's such a fascinating period of history, and as you mentioned earlier, there's this kind of shadowy group or species known as the Denisovans. Can you tell us a little bit more about them and why they're important to the history of human evolution?
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Charles Hyam
Yes, I'm very, very interested in Denisovans, largely because my son Tom is also an archaeologist. He currently formerly at Oxford and now at the University of Vienna, and he has been very closely involved with the excavations at Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. And he and his wife Katerina, who is also an archaeologist specializing in this period, have made many trips to Denisova in order to excavate with their Russian colleagues and in their cases, be involved closely with two aspects to what was found. The first was the radiocarbon and other dating techniques to date these Denisovans, and secondly, to take specimens for DNA analysis. Now, how were the Denisovans found? Denisova Cave was occupied over not just tens but hundreds of thousands of years, a very, very long sequence. One of the problems with Denisova Cave is that it was also occupied by other creatures, including hyenas. And hyenas, as we all know, like to chomp up bones and crush them up and eat them and then excrete them. So the. The archaeological layers at Denisova Cave yield lots and lots of fragments of bone and very few complete ones. So the only way to know if there are any humans, who the humans were, who lived there, is to take a tiny chip of bone and see if you can find some DNA in it. But the first thing you've got to try and do is to find human bone, because there are lots of other chips of bone that come from other animals. So what Tom and Katarina have done was, is to take bags of chips of bone from Denisova Cave back to Oxford, where they then were, and then apply a new technique called zooms that can take a tiny fragment of bone and tell you whether it's humid or not. And so you find the chips of bone and when you take them to your DNA lab, in this case that of Svante Pa Orbo, who won the Nobel Prize, incidentally, for his work on identifying early Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA and the structure of the human past, they began looking at the DNA from bones from Denisova and found that there was a new human, a human that was not a Neanderthal, not anatomically modern human, although related to Neanderthals. And so all of a sudden, we have a whole new vista of which humans were actually living in the Far east of Asia. To this day or until the last month or so, we really had no idea what they looked like other than from their tiny chips bone, one of which no bigger than your little thumbnail. Tom and Katharina took to Svantheper Aubo's lab, and it turned out to be the first example in the history of the human species coming from a young girl with one Denisovan parent and one Neanderthal parent, because Neanderthals and Denisovans were coexisting clearly in the Altai region of Siberia. And so the whole issue of the Denisovans is progressing very rapidly. And only in the last few months they've managed to get DNA out of a complete cranium from China that was hitherto not particularly closely assigned to any particular variety of human. We now know it was Denisovan, and we know too that it had enormous brow ridges over its eyes, which articulating the muscles that are used in eating, by the way. So, again, the analysis of DNA from Melanesian and Australian aboriginals, First Nation people, are showing that there was introgression, I. E. Relationships between the incoming humans and these Denisovans in that part of the world.
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Marshall Po
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Patrick Jory
It's such a fascinating story and you sense that there's so much more of the story to tell in the. In the 19th century, archaeologists come up with this three age division of prehistory, which many listeners would be familiar with. That is the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. And these periods were taken to correspond to different levels of cultural progress. Does this schema work for the prehistory of Southeast Asia? So, for example, is the Bronze Age in Europe similar to the Bronze Age in Southeast Asia?
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Charles Hyam
This is a very fascinating issue all round. You're quite right. The three age system was devised by the Danish archaeologists in the 19th century to divide the sequence in that part of the world into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age and an Iron Age. So they were making a museum and you had, coming out of the ground, fertile archaeological ground of Denmark. Some people were making bronze axes, some people making stone axes, other people making iron axes or iron whatever. So they put their museum exhibitions according to the technology that could be identified. Well, it's still used as a scaffolding for prehistory in Europe. And many of my colleagues and I too have used this scaffolding as a useful structural means of describing and then interpreting the prehistoric sequence to the Western European, but not necessarily to the Chinese. Neolithic means farming it means the domestication of, in our part of the world, rice and millet and pigs and cattle. And farming to the Chinese. Neolithic, in fact, is much more commonly used to describe people who made pottery vessels. Now, hunter gatherers in China made a lot of pottery vessels, so they call hunter gatherers Neolithic. It can be rather confusing. But what actually happened is that you find in the prehistoric sequence of Southeast Asia, as I said earlier, at least 60,000 years of anatomically modern human hunter gatherers. They were hunting and gathering in a very, very productive part of the world. It was hot, there were lots of fish, there were lots of plants to accumulate, there were deer, there were teeming with wild animals to hunt. And so there's a lot of hunting and gathering going on. Particularly rich habitats were found on the coast. And then in the Yangtze Valley, people began about 8,000 years ago to show a great interest in rice. It's a marsh plant, and they were gathering wild rice. And progressively over millennia, the rice became increasingly cultivated and ultimately domesticated. I won't go into the biological details of how rice becomes domesticated. It's a bit of a long story. But the facts are that rice became increasingly important and dominant to the increasingly farming societies of the Yangtze. And the same was going on in the Yellow River Valley. This time for millet, not rice for millet. Now, rice and millet are the fundamental contributors to the diet of these early farmers, along with pigs and fish, by the way, and cattle. And it's a population producing means of subsistence. It produces population growth. And so as soon as you get farming, you tend to get a diaspora of farmers out of the. Out of the seminal area where the first plants were domesticated and permanent farming settlements created in Southeast Asia. They came by coast. We can actually trace them down by the coastal route, Hong Kong, and then into the Red River Delta and then further down the coast of Vietnam, round into the Gulf of the Siam. And they also separately infiltrated Southeast Asia from the major rivers, the Mekong river, the Red river, the Irrawaddy river, into India into Burma and the Salween too, the river routes. And they were different people, they had different shaped crania. They weren't the hunter gatherers that we are used to in Southeast Asia. They were East Asian, who for 60,000 years or more had developed their own form of cranial morphology, of head shape. And now we have this wonderful new technique of DNA. And by looking at the DNA, if it survives, of the people who were farming and those who were hunting, you can tell them apart. You can actually look at the DNA and say these individuals had to come from the Yangtze or from further north. So you can trace by DNA and by the characteristics of how people were buried in their graves and the artifacts that they were being made. You can trace the diaspora south, the migratory movement of farmers that form the basis of all later cultural developments in Southeast Asia, going right up to the foundation of the first states and the first civilizations. It's an absolutely fascinating story. When I began in Southeast Asia, an American colleague, Kent Flannery, once said, in Southeast Asia, the origins of rice is the $64,000 question. And it wasn't answered. China was a closed shop. You couldn't do anything with China. It was under the Mao Zedong, the Red Guards. There was no contact to speak of with Chinese colleagues. But the whole thing's opened up now. I mean, I go to China regularly. I'm going next month. I have many Chinese friends and colleagues. And the whole thing has become so beautifully integrated now between the two areas. It's a very refreshing development.
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Patrick Jory
Yeah, refreshing and so exciting. So bronze casting technology makes it to Southeast Asia. What are the key features of the Bronze Age?
- [35:06]
Charles Hyam
This, again, has been an incredible saga, really, to put in a nutshell in the 1970s, and particularly at the site of Ban Chiang in northeast Thailand in 1974. 5 I was there. I was excavating with Chester Gorman and Chester Gorman and Don Bayard and Bill Solheim, to put it all in a very, very precise nutshell, simply got the dating wrong. They used radiocarbon dates and published claims that the Bronze age in these two sites goes back into the 4th millennium BC which makes it the earliest metal in the world, the earliest bronze in the world. And this was sensational news that was to be found in Time magazine and the New York Times and all over the place. Well, it's not the case. It's been completely disproven, although there are still the occasional outlet that recites these outdated and disproven claims. In fact, when you actually date the site of Ban Cheng, as my son Tom did, he's a radiocarbon dating specialist. He said, look, dad, let's sort this out. Let's date the human bones. That'll sort it out. And so I got permission from the Fine Arts Department and from the University Museum in Philadelphia, the director, to get about 50 or 60 bones from the humans who were buried at Ban Qiang. And Tom did a wonderful job dating them, and he did the same for me at my site excavations at Bahn Lon Wat. And to put it again, very briefly, we have dated the initial taking up of metal technology, bronze technology in Southeast asia, not at 3600 or, as claimed by others, 2000 BC, but close to 1000-1100 BC. And as for its impact, well, where did bronze begin? It began in Serbia. It then spread north of the Black Sea. It was picked up by the Yamnaya people, who had horse transport and wheels, and it came across the steppes. It reached China at about 2000, 2200 BC. The knowledge of metal, it proliferated in the early civilizations of the Yellow River Valley and in the Sichuan. And prospectors, probably based in places like Sichuan in China and Yunnan and the middle Yangtze region, came south looking for more copper, because copper was used in immense quantities in the early Chinese states, dating back to 1600 to 1200 BC. And they found copper in Southeast Asia and they began to export. We began to find the export of little socketed axes and spears and other artifacts coming into the Neolithic communities of Southeast Asia. You ask about the impact of metal. Well, it is quite fascinating to see how different societies picked on metal and what they did with it. What the Chiang civilization of China did was to make massive serving vessels for food and for wine, and used bronze basically to show their exalted status by huge ritual feasts. Now, the Neolithic communities of Southeast Asia were quite different. They were much on a much smaller scale. And when the first bronze axes and knowledge of how to cast in bronze came into Southeast Asia, what they did, as I say, was to replicate in metal what they'd already used in stone. Instead of having a stone axe, you had a bronze axe. And access to metal is one way of, if you own it, if you're lucky enough, when it's very rare and precious and just coming on the scene is to advertise your status. And so at the site of Ban Non Wat, which is in northeast Thailand, we had an astonishing series of prehistoric excavations, as detailed in my book, in which, quite honestly, I could barely believe what I was looking at. We find what we called super burials. All of a sudden, when bronze came in, we find exalted elite individuals in this particular cemetery, part of the site, buried with immense wealth relative to their Neolithic predecessors, or indeed to other known Bronze Age sites. In Southeast Asia. Many Neolithic people would be buried with a couple of pots, three or four. The Bronze Age people were buried with about 80 beautiful painted, decorated pottery vessels. They had thousands and thousands of imported precious shell beads. They wore shell bangles from the wrist to the shoulder. You know, 3040 on each arm. And they were buried with the socketed copper base, sometimes bronze axes that were now being cast locally, but on the sites that they occupied. And they also wore the occasional bronze bangle and bronze anklets, again to show their superior status. And so there is a little opening chapter here that we discovered at Barn on Watt, that when bronze came in, it was one of the artifacts, along with shell and marble jewelry, that was used to advertise the exalted elite aggrandizing status of a section of the community in a Bronze Age site. So this is what we think actually happened when in about 1050 or 1100 BC metal came on the scene, or.
- [40:43]
Patrick Jory
From one metal to another. Iron. When does the Iron Age begin in Southeast Asia? And how does iron change Southeast Asian society?
- [40:52]
Charles Hyam
Well, you see, iron ore is much more widespread in nature than copper or tin, which were the principal components of bronze. And there are two sources, potential sources, of iron coming into Southeast Asia. One is the development in the 4th and 5th centuries BC of an increasingly intensified maritime exchange network that was beginning to link South Asia, India with Southeast Asia. I think it was in the 4th century BC that the emperor Ashoka of India of the Ashokan Empire was sending Buddhist missionaries eastward into Southeast Asia. And there was a sharpening of trade contact involving the acquisition in Southeast Asia of all sorts of new precious things that people were interested in owning, one of which was glass, another was carnelian jewelry, another was jewelry made of agate, and another was iron. And during the 5th and 4th and 3rd centuries BC, this maritime trade network that brought in new ideas and new goods began to penetrate Southeast Asia. And you see a rather rapid development of very interesting port cities in which not only Southeast Asians but Indians were resident. And this is how iron is thought to have come into that particular part of Southeast Asia. On the Thai Malay Peninsula region, there's another source of iron too, and that is up in Northern Vietnam, which was in much closer contact with the South States of China, which by now were, well, conversant with iron. And so we begin to see the first iron artifacts coming into the so called Dong Son culture of Northern Vietnam. So there were two separate entries of iron coming in. Iron initially was quite interestingly, in the sites that I'm familiar with, iron was used not just for weaponry and for tools, it was used for ornaments as well. They were using iron bangles, for example. And over time, iron was incorporated into agricultural endeavors, including, for example, quite widespread use of iron hoes in your rice agriculture. In this early stages of the iron Age. And clearly too, in various sites we find iron weaponry. There were people fighting each other, or at least using spears to hunt wild animals. But increasingly, during the period of the Iron Age, human remains show unfortunate evidence for trauma, for injury through conflict. And so iron came in and really did have rather an important input into the way in which societies were able to cope not only with the environment, but with each other through conflict. Of course, when you have an iron axe, it's much easier to clear forest for creation of rice fields. And so one of the major impacts of the later Iron Age in Southeast Asia was definitely the reaction to another climate change that took place in 3 or 400 AD. Of course, the Iron Age began in about 450 BC, but continued for 1000 years when the climate became much drier. And instead of folding their tents and walking away, the Iron Age people reacted with decisive enterprise by building banks around their large town settlements to create moat reservoirs and feed water into their rice fields. And they began. Their smiths began to forge instead of hoes, plowshares, and with the power and strength of the domestic water buffalo, they began plowing in irrigated fields. And this, incidentally, was the seminal buffalo change that led was one of the principal components of the development of early states.
- [44:52]
Patrick Jory
It's the perfect segue into the next theme I wanted to talk about that is this turning point in Southeast Asian history with the transition to states. When does this happen and why?
- [45:03]
Charles Hyam
It happened incredibly quickly. Actually, there are two major inputs here that I ought to just quickly summarize. The first is the quickening again of that exchange with India that brought in so many new ideas. The a writing a script, Buddhism, Hinduism, making great temples using bricks of the same size as they were using in India. And this was very much a coastal phenomenon because this is where most of the initial trade impact was made. And so we find in the lower reaches of the Mekong river, the rise of a very important early city community. This great site of ok Eo, which we find the rise of this so called state of Fu Nan. And this was described in 200 or so AD by a remarkable visitation from Chinese diplomats who came south and then looked and saw and went back to China and described what they had witnessed, which were cities writing, kings, warfare and so on. And this was very much rising up from the very fertile interchange between thrusting charismatic indigenous leaders who adopted a new cloak of religion to exalt their own status and become, as it were, the first nascent God kings of Southeast Asia. There is a second input that I'M very interested in, in myself and that is in the work that we've done in northeast Thailand, some 300km from the coast where all these other developments were taking place. Where, as I said, you have the development of plough based rice farming that led to the rise of social elites who owned the best rice land and who incidentally buried their dead with most beautiful gold and silver jewelry, bronze belts, huge weight of bronze ornaments, gold, silver, agate, carnelian, based upon the fact that they presumably, we think, owned the best ricelands. And the transition up there into early inland states only took place in about a century because some of these people adopting the Hindu and or the Buddhist religion and sometimes the syncretization of both began founding cities, one of whom was called Devanika, who founded a great city called Wat Phu on the Mekong river. Was it the 5th 6th century A.D. then you have yet another rise of early, very complex societies in the Red river area of Northern Vietnam, again based very much upon resistance to Chinese imperial domination. And you have the rise of these great Dong Son chiefdoms based on a site called Koloa, which is a huge urban complex quite unrelated to what was going on in the Mekong Delta or in Northeast Thailand. And you have yet a fourth because they were springing up like mushrooms in the Pew states of Burma, which I cover in one of my chapters.
- [48:07]
Patrick Jory
You're one of the authorities on the history of the ancient Angkorian empire. And in the book you show that in the last decade or two our understanding of the history of Angkor has greatly improved with the use of this new technology known as lidar. I think you mentioned it in the introduction that that is laser imaging, detection and ranging. Can you explain this new technology and tell us how or what it has helped us discover about Angkor?
- [48:32]
Charles Hyam
Well, yes, you're quite right. Lidar has completely transformed our understanding of the Angkorian state. You've got to appreciate that Angkor itself, the great huge dispersed city complex, is in part at least covered by jungle. If you go to Angkor Wat, as I've done on many occasions, the central part of Angkor Wat has been cleared for tourists. And you can go up to the temple, but within the moats there is a vast area under forest. If you go to the nearby city of Angkor Thom, this great three kilometer by three kilometer city, again, you can walk in along a road and you can go to to look at the temples in the middle, but the rest is jungle. Now, in the 13th century AD, a Chinese visitor lived at Angkor Thom for about, what was it, nine months or more. And he wrote a fascinating report of this vibrant city. But if you go there now, all you see away from where the tourists go, is the silent gloom of the forest. Now we want to know what the city comprised. How did it tick? What did it look like? So, lidar, you put onto a helicopter, this incredible device that shoots billions of laser shots down onto the surface of the planet and back up again, some of which actually get through the forest to the ground and back again. And so very rapidly, when you run lidar across Angkor Thom or Angkor Wat or the Great or any of the other temples, what you get from your computer screen is an amazing plan of the city. You can see the streets, you can see the pools where people bathe. You can see the mounds where people have their houses. You can see the palace emerging from the forest. You can see the grid pattern of the suburbs. The whole thing suddenly crystallizes into daylight. And not only at Angkor itself, because the Angkorean kingdom comprised numerous suburban and provincial cities and temples. And these too have been subjected to lidar. And they too show the layout of the temple complexes and the cities themselves. Now, for example, Angkor Wat was a temple mausoleum to a great king, Suryavarman ii. But nobody knew what was going on within the moats of Angkor Wat itself. Now we can see this incredible grid pattern of streets and houses, and people were living there, the people who continued to live on inside Angkor, what, after the death of King Suryavarman ii, would have been principally concerned with maintaining the God cult of the dead king. He was deified at death. He had a new name, Parama Vishnu Loka, he who's gone to live in the sacred world of Vishnu. And so you had dancers and you had people who put on the veils onto the statues of the gods. You had people who cooked, you had people who cleaned. You got administrators, you got bureaucrats. And Hank or what, rather than just being a simple mausoleum where people went and worshipped a dead king, was a vibrant living community of about 12,000 people. And all this is consequent upon planning of the city. Finding out what it was actually structured as based on lidar.
- [52:03]
Patrick Jory
One of the many mysteries about the history of Angkor is its sudden decline in about the 14th century. It now seems that changes in climate may have had something to do with it.
- [52:13]
Charles Hyam
Is that right? Indeed it did. There was a. Again, the monsoon is a very fickle phenomenon, and you can never guarantee that year by year, even you're going to have enough rain to grow rice. Angkor was very much based upon the control of water. Water was crucial to Angkor. That's why the kings built these gigantic reservoirs known as Barae. They were measuring eight by the biggest. The western Barae measures about eight by two kilometers. And there are other Barae, the eastern Barae, the northern Barae, were all used to store water. Now, again with lidar, we now have a much clearer insight into what these great reservoirs were for, because there have been two principal models. One is that these reservoirs were simply symbolic of a king's status, that you can supply water as an indication of the king's deified status and close relation to the gods. For example, in the middle of each of these great reservoirs, there's a temple, Mebon temple, in which the deities were worshipped. And you could, according to the inscriptions, go across to the temples to worship and wash away your sins. But there's another model too, that there were also reservoirs for taking irrigation water into rice fields. And this has come through as being rather a significant contributor to the economy, because the great western Barae, for example, coming from the southwestern corner, you've got the distributory canals going into a whole host, a sea of rice fields between the reservoir and the great lake that runs a few kilometers to the south. And the whole area was covered in rice fields that could be irrigated from the reservoirs. And so again, the importance of water was crucial. Now, in the 15th century AD, the fickle old monsoon began to misbehave. Some years were incredibly dry, and others there was an incredible amount of rainfall. And so Roland Fletcher, my friend and colleague in Sydney University, has been instrumental in excavating some of the sites of Angkor and has found serious evidence for sedimentation of the canals and the destruction of the infrastructure for water distribution as a consequence of this climatic change. Now, it's quite wrong to say that the kingdom of Angkor died with the removal of the royal household and the administration from Angkor. Angkor continued to be occupied after the climatic downturn, but the center of gravity of the Angkorean civilization in fact moved closer to modern Phnom Penh, near the Mekong river, at a new capital and continues to this day. I mean, the King Sihamoni of Cambodia is descended from the last kings of Angkor. So Angkor was never officially civilization of Angkor never died when Angkor itself ceased to be the capital. It continues vigorously to this day.
- [55:21]
Patrick Jory
We've covered a period of almost 2 million years to arrive at the classical states of Southeast Asia that flourish at the end of the first millennium. What I wanted to ask was, can we draw a connection between the prehistoric peoples of Southeast Asia and the peoples of modern Southeast Asian nations today?
- [55:40]
Charles Hyam
Fascinating question. In my. In the long time I've been involved in archaeology, I've seen at least two really major breakthroughs. The first was radiocarbon dating. The second has been emphatically DNA. And so when you look at the DNA of modern Southeast Asians, you'll find that there's still quite a healthy contribution from those very self same hunter gatherers who were living there for those 60,000 years, and indeed from the Neolithic farmers who came in to Southeast asia about between 4 and 5,000 years ago. Of course, there have been other inputs as well over time. One is the input infusion of genes from South Asia as the people who lived there came and settled. And there are communities now, relatively remote communities in Central Thailand, in the hills of Central Thailand there, that still speak the Mon language, which is an Austro Asiatic language and quite different from Thai. I mean, linguistics again gives us a huge input into understanding the origins of not just Southeast Asians, but different Southeast Asians. For example, the Thai language and the language of Cambodia, the Khmer language, are completely different from each other. The Thai people have come into Thailand fairly recently and overwhelmed the indigenous farmer Mon communities. But when you look at the DNA of modern Thai people, you'll find that there is infusion there. There is a continuation of Hmong people as well, because they didn't rub them out. They simply lived alongside each other and intermarried and integrated and grew a new culture and a new society. Which makes it all the more fascinating.
- [57:29]
Patrick Jory
You have a career that spans well over 50 years. It's so impressive and if I might say so, inspiring for young scholars that you're still so active as a researcher. So before we conclude, I was wondering if you were working on a new project and would you be able to tell us what that project is?
- [57:47]
Charles Hyam
Sadly, I can't excavate anymore because when you excavate a site, you're really committed to analyzing it for some years before publishing it. And if you don't publish what you excavate, you're nothing more than a looter. But I have. You're right in saying I have excavated an awful lot of sites. And what we found is still to be found in museums and in archive material. Now you ask about what I'm doing at the moment. Well, I'm working on several projects, but I'll mention the one that interests Me most, if I may. My most recent excavation that finished about five years ago is a remarkable Iron Age settlement called Nong Ban Jack. And it's a wonderful site and we had such enormous fun and excitement excavating it. Now, in 1991, when DNA was coming on the scene and it became possible to try and extract DNA from prehistoric people, I began a quest to get DNA out of the prehistoric people that I've dug up. And bit by bit over the years, it's become increasingly significant. Techniques of deriving DNA from prehistoric remains of human remains has become increasingly sophisticated and enabled. Sadly, DNA survives far better in cold and dry conditions than it does in hot and wet ones. But at Non Barn Jack, my colleague Hugh McCall, working with Esker Vestas lab in Copenhagen, has managed to get good samples of human DNA out of 35 of our individuals that we excavated at Non Banjac. And these. This is essentially a first for Southeast Asia to get so many samples from one site. And so he and I and colleagues in Copenhagen are now working on the interpretation of the DNA on three fronts. The first is the DNA tells us who are the people. To what extent do we find hunter gatherers still surviving into genes, still continuing into the Iron Age? There was introgression between the first farmers and their descendants with the local hunter gatherers. And the next is when you find, as we found at Non Barn Jack, individuals buried under the floorboards in rooms of their domestic houses. Imagine finding a room with two people buried alongside each other, both adult, one male and one woman. How are they related? Are they brother and sister? Are they mother and daughter, or mother and son, or son and daughter, or are they a married partner? And if you can get this across the site over time, you can actually begin to assess and reconstruct and understand a social system that was once thought beyond human view. As soon as you try to reconstruct, as my mentor at Cambridge many years ago, Sir Edmund Leach said, if you try to get the social organization out of a prehistoric people, you're doomed. You'll never do it. But I think with DNA we can. So that's the second plank of our research. And the third is that with DNA you can start saying whether a population was growing or declining or static in terms of numbers. And so we are working intensively at the moment on the DNA from Non Bun Jack and when we finished our research, it's going to be a bit of a blockbuster and I'm very, very excited about.
- [61:22]
Patrick Jory
Just sounds so exciting. That was the feeling I got from reading the book it's such a lively and exciting field, and so I can't wait to see what comes Next. But after 2 million years, sadly, we've run out of time. So. Charles Heim, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the new edition of your book, early Southeast from the First Humans to the First Civilizations. It's published by River Books and Nus Press just recently. A beautiful publication. Make sure you try to get your hands on a copy.
- [61:54]
Charles Hyam
Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure talking about this. Thank you.
- [61:59]
Patrick Jory
And you've been listening to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Thanks again, everyone, for listening. You can download or stream this interview and thousands more free of charge via the New Books website or itunes.
- [62:31]
Charles Hyam
It.