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Dougald O’Reilly, "Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute, the Griffith Asia Institute, the New York Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
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Welcome back everyone to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. We're 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. From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to about the 15th century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first early states that were the forerunners of the countries that we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Empires of the Southern Ocean. Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia. Published by BloomSbury Academic in 2026, this year tells the complex story of the rise of these earlier polities from chiefdoms to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the development of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia's participation in long distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Today I had the great pleasure to talk to the book's author, Dougald O'Reilly. Dougald is professor of Archaeology in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Dougal, congratulations on this magnificent book and thank you for coming on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about it.
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C
Oh, thank you so much, Patrick, for inviting me on. I'm looking forward to our chat.
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B
Great. So could we perhaps start off if I could ask you how you became interested in the prehistory of Southeast Asia and the field of Southeast Asian archaeology in particular?
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C
Well, sure, I guess I've always had a really deep interest in archaeology. Since going back to as early as five years old, I've always been interested in it, something my parents actually encouraged. So that was the main hook for my entire career. And when I was about 20, I backpacked around the world and one of the places that I went was Thailand. And I really fell in love with Southeast Asia, just the exoticism of the food and the people and the culture. And so when I returned to Canada, I enrolled in an archaeology course focused mostly on classical archaeology, but my aim was always to get back to Southeast Asia. And I was recommended to approach Professor Charles Hyam. He was one of the foremost experts on the region. And I was lucky to be accepted into the MA program and later a PhD at the University of Otago. So I'm really greatly indebted to New Zealand as they provided me scholarships for my studies. And I wouldn't have been able to realize my dream without that support. And while I was there, I had the chance in 1994 to visit Cambodia. And again, I was absolutely enthralled with the country. At that time, Cambodia had just seen the end of the UN peacekeeping mission, untak, and it was pretty wild. But we did manage to get up to Angkor and some of the more remote temples, but the temples of Angkor at that time were completely deserted. I think I saw maybe one or two other people on that trip. Later, I went on to finish my PhD and by pure serendipity, a job with UNESCO came up teaching at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. And I applied and was luckily accepted for that. So I taught archaeology there for about four years. And sadly, during that time, looting of prehistoric sites was becoming a really major problem. And in 2003, I set up an NGO, a non governmental organization called Heritage Watch, that's still going to this day. And we're working to try to stop or at least slow the destruction of prehistoric and historic sites in Cambodia. And today we're still running a program called Heritage for Kids. So we're teaching school age children about the importance of preserving heritage.
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B
Now, this is a very big and complex book which encompasses most of Southeast Asia over hundreds of years of its early history. What gave you the idea to write such an ambitious book?
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Well, the book is really built around a small number of big ideas, I think, and I work through those ideas region by region. So basically the headline argument is that early Southeast Asian polities were probably better classified as chiefdoms rather than states. And also I look at the issue of Indianization and push back on the idea that this was something that was forced on Southeast Asia, but rather it was something adopted by the early elites in Southeast Asia rather than something that happened to them. And also I look at what drove the changes in society in Southeast Asia across that region. So long distance trade warfare, certainly. And also the adoption of indic religious legitimization is a theme that I look at. So all of these are working on the substrate of what you would classify as the indigenous complexity that really had taken root in the Iron Age in Southeast Asia. But where it all really comes together, of course, is Angkor. Everything else is sort of the run up and the parallel track to that.
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When we compare the early civilizations of Southeast Asia to those of, say, China or India or the Middle east or Europe, it seems that the formation of polities that can be described as states occurred quite a bit later. Am I right? And if so, what are the main reasons for that?
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C
I think you are right to varying degrees. I think that there's a lot of interesting things that can be teased out. And one of the really interesting things about this book is the advances that have been made in archaeology in Southeast Asia in the last 20 years. So we've come leaps and bounds in understanding the story of the evolution of these societies. And part of the book is looking at the different lenses or the different ways that archaeologists and historians as well can look at the development of complex society. So I talk a bit in the early chapters of this book about some of the different approaches to understanding the past. Themes like heterarchy, in which you've got this horizontal complexity where you don't see ranked hierarchy. I think that was arguably the conception of society before the Iron Age in Southeast Asia. So Bronze Age societies, I think could be argued, were organized in a more heterarchical fashion. And then some of the other ideas that I've brought in are political economy and wealth finance versus staple finance. So I think those fit really well with the data that we have for Southeast Asia. So by wealth finance, basically the elites were relying on trade goods so that they could build their power base. But for real sustainability, they had to switch that model to a staple finance. So getting control over food production, for example, and as an extension of that, the control of water, which obviously becomes a major part of these big kingdoms that develop. And also just to the point about the model of states in Southeast Asia, they're different in many ways. They're often cast as being what are known as mandala states or dendritic polities sometimes. So these amorphous borders are borders that can expand and contract. But the center of the mandala, the core, is the capital, and it's held together really by a network of Vassals or allies. So not really a fixed territory.
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B
Just for a clarification, the Iron Age in Southeast Asia, when does it start and is that starting point? How much later is it by comparison to say, Europe or China?
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C
Well, a good ballpark figure, you could go to 500 BC through to about 5, 500 AD. There's a debate over the exact starting date, but as a ballpark figure, we could say that covers the Iron Age. And after around 500 AD you're getting into this proto historic period when we're starting to learn about the states of Southeast Asia or the polities of Southeast Asia from third parties.
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B
Okay, you mentioned just a minute ago this sort of pre state political form which you call chiefdoms. Can you explain what these chiefdoms are, how they are organized, what their significance is?
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Yeah, well, the chiefdoms were really organized around powerful individuals who I argue in the book originally founded their power on wealth finance. So they were controlling exotic materials and they built their power base around that. But building your power base around the control of exotic materials is a fragile state. And also of course, family is really important. So you don't have the trapping of more complex political organizations like standing armies and often monumentalism and infrastructure that goes around the later developments of state level societies.
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One of the central themes of the book is how these chiefdoms transform into more complex states, of which I guess Angkor would be the prime example, although there are lots of other examples in the book. Can you summarize? I know it's a complicated process and the book goes into a lot of detail, but can you summarize for the listeners how this process of transformation from chieftains to states takes place?
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C
Well, one of the big things that happens is that I argue that really globalization is beginning around this time and this plays a really important part in the story of the evolution of political complexity in Southeast Asia. So we're getting contact from the early Iron Age. This is when we start to see in the archaeological record the appearance of items that have been imported. So this would be things rather quotidian objects like beads made of glass or semiprecious stone like carnelian and agate. So Southeast Asians are coming into contact with traders from India and also from China. So Southeast Asia really sits at the nexus of this trade between these great civilizations and. And they benefited considerably. And I think that the political elites that were in Southeast Asia utilized that evolving system to establish and enhance their power structures in the region.
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B
You touched on this point earlier, but the late first millennium, before the Common era and in the first centuries of the first millennium, have been characterized as a period in which Southeast Asia becomes quite Indianised. And you deal with this theme in quite a lot of detail in chapter three. And the idea is that there are elements of Indic culture that flow into the region and help, you know, shape the societies and later on, the states that were forming in this period. So this Indianization argument, can you tell us a little bit about its origin and maybe, maybe some of the criticisms of it and whether it's still valid today?
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C
Well, it's a fascinating topic and it is a hotly debated topic as well. So Indianization has evolved over the many years since it was first introduced into academic debate. A lot of the earlier ideas around Indianization, certainly advanced by some of the Indian scholars, was more along a colonial line, whereas the argument was put forth that the Indians had colonized Southeast Asia and brought civilization to the region.
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B
I've got a colleague from India who's an engineer, and he's quite certain that Southeast Asia was colonized by India.
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C
Yeah, well, that was certainly a really prominent argument, especially with Indian scholars in the 30s and 40s, and that has since evolved. The French scholars scrutinized the question a little bit more, but there was still certainly this idea that the Indians enforced Indianization in Southeast Asia. But I think that archaeology has played a big part in the evolution of this story, because we have been able to show the work of many of my colleagues has been astounding in demonstrating that political complexity was already well afoot in the Iron Age in Southeast Asia. So these were complex societies and intelligent individuals who were trying to maintain and enhance their positions in their own societies and saw an opportunity, I would argue, to do just that through using the exotica that had been introduced from India.
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B
One of the themes of the book that pops up here and there is the role of climate change in Southeast Asian societies and politics. Does this phenomenon have any role in the process of state formation in the period that your book examines?
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Yes, it does. In fact, I think in Northeast Thailand, I think there's a good example of climate variability playing a role in the evolution of culture. So one of the fascinating things about Northeast Thailand is the development of moated sites. So there are literally hundreds of sites that date to the Iron Age that are surrounded by ditches, sometimes up to five concentric moats around these sites. And if we look at the climate records from that period, there is some correlation between the creation of these sites and a downturn in the monsoons and rainfall. So One might argue it's very difficult to prove these things, but you could argue that this proliferation of moated sites and trying to capture water was all part of the story of evolving elites in that region. So people trying to gain control over water, moving indeed from that wealth, finance, control over bronze, or perhaps iron exchange, into more concrete and enduring strategies of control over water and control over land, which obviously equals control over food.
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Okay, so the chapters of the book go on to examine the rise of different civilizations and early states across mainland and insular Southeast Asia. And you start off with the region known today as Myanmar or Burma. Can you tell us about the earliest civilizations in that part of Southeast Asia?
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Sure. Myanmar is a fascinating place and regrettably it's rather restricted now due to the political situation there. But perhaps the most or the earliest very complex society that grew out of the Iron Age in Myanmar were a people that are known as the Pu or the Turkle. They probably called themselves something similar to Turkle, but we know them as the Pu from historic documents. And what began to develop in Myanmar up and down the Irrawaddy were these large cities surrounded by substantial brick walls and eventually very substantial Buddhist buildings, stupas and monasteries, et cetera. And so these are absolutely fascinating sites that are a little bit under researched, so hopefully those will see more archaeological research in the future. But these rather look like states if you see the urban infrastructure that was developed by the Pew. But I don't think that we can say for sure that the PYU were operating at the level of the state. I think they were very complex chiefdoms and I think that they probably controlled an area around these centers of say, 30 to 100 kilometers. And so sort of, if you look at the Greek model of the Greek city states, perhaps a parallel could be drawn between the Pu system. But they were certainly culturally linked. But perhaps politically they were in competition with one another. The walls around the sites indeed might indicate that there was some social stress going on, why they needed these things.
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B
You alluded to Myanmar's current day political crisis really are there even before the crisis, perhaps Burmese archaeologists who have been doing research on these early civilizations. Is there this kind of research going on now despite all of the conflict, or has research, archaeological research on Burma sort of come to a standstill?
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C
Oh, no, there's ongoing research and I have colleagues currently who are working there, like Bob Hudson, Charlotte Galloway, are undertaking research in Myanmar. I think it's difficult politically to attract research funding because of the political situation and obviously the situation on the ground impacts that to a considerable degree. So let's just hope that that situation improves because I have to say, Burma is one of my favorite countries in the world. I've visited there when I was doing my research. And the people are so genuinely beautiful people with a really kind and giving attitude and really true Buddhists. I had to say.
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Yeah, just a very tragic situation in so many ways. I was really glad to see that you've devoted a whole chapter to a much less well known pre modern kingdom located in present day central Thailand called Dvaravati. And I guess you'd say it's a kind of a poor cousin to Angkor. Can you tell us about Dvaravati? What do you know about it, who built it, how significant it was, and what happened to it?
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C
Dvaravati is another fascinating case. And I guess a lot of the examples in the book highlight how little we know about some of these really complex polities that existed in Southeast Asia. So Dvaravati was a Mon civilization that covered most of what was now central Thailand and arguably up into the Korat Plateau in the northeast, and probably had some connection to the monster people of southern Myanmar as well. So again, very similar to the Pew in Burma. I think the academic consensus would be that this was a very large shared culture, but probably not a shared polity. So it wasn't a cohesive polity. We find a lot of attributes of Indianization, as they were extremely Buddhist, but they also had influence from Hindu religion in Dvravati. They were using coins there. But the regional differences in the art and the archaeological evidence, which seem to indicate that they probably were not a shared polity or a unified polity, but rather a rather fractured one, perhaps similar to the Pew situation in Myanmar.
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And do we know how it went into decline and sort of disappeared? Not without a trace, but certainly far less well known than the more famous Angkor.
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C
Yeah, though there's a lot of arguments about it. And in the book you can find in the appendix, there's a map, a series of maps rather, that sort of illustrate how complex the situation in Southeast Asia was in terms of the politics of the region. So there was a lot of competing polities. Many of them were very militarized. So we see the rise of the Thai being pushed out of southern China and beginning to infiltrate into Thailand. Certainly that probably was a major pressure on Dvaravati. And I mean, there's some arguments that because they were apparently such a Buddhist kingdom, that they were not as warlike as some of the their neighboring polities, which perhaps was to their detriment. So it is a little bit of a mystery. We don't have the full story of the arc of the decline of Dvaravati, but certainly they had ceased to exist and were really swamped by the incoming Thai populations.
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I know in Thai art history, Dvaravati has a prominent place because there is a style of Buddha image which is associated with that area of very beautiful images that people know as the Dvaravati style that later get superseded by other styles. So within that sort of art historical space, it's quite prominent, I think, perhaps
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the iconic Dvaravati Buddhist images of the Dharma Chakra, the beautiful Buddhist wheel which illustrates the teaching of the Buddha or the Dharma.
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Now, in chapter seven, you move out of mainland Southeast Asia for a while to the archipelago, and there are lots of different polities and we maybe can't go through all of them. But perhaps if I could ask you about arguably the most famous pre modern kingdom of the Archipedago, Srividaya. Where was it located? When did it emerge? What gave rise to this kingdom or empire, and how did it eventually go into decline?
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Well, that's another fascinating tale out of Southeast Asia. So chapter six and seven are quite closely related. In the previous chapter, I talk about the peninsular part of Southeast Asia, basically the Malay Peninsula. So that's now receiving quite a lot of archaeological research. Some great work has been done by French colleagues there looking at the impact of Indian trade on the peninsula. So we have to think of Srivijaya in the milieu of what was going on and the massive amount of economic activity that was passing through the waterways of insular and peninsular Southeast Asia. So this was a very active place. And this polity of Srivijaya arose in the Indonesian islands, based around a city that is now identified as Palembang. So the polity, it seems, rather began to grow in power, not based on an agrarian base, but more on extending their control over the waterways. And this is something that was really unknown up until the early 1900s, when French scholars happened across some inscriptions and realized that there was in fact, this really impressive and powerful polity called Srivijaya existing in Southeast Asia. And since then, we've come to learn quite a lot. But compared to a lot of the other polities in Southeast Asia, Srivijaya has vanishingly little archaeological evidence to boast for it. So we don't have these massive cities and temple complexes that we see. They were rather more invested in, I think, political control. So Srivijaya was a bit of a thorn in the side, I think for the. The major players in Southeast Asian trade, especially India, who in the early parts of the 11th century, indeed sent a really amazing punitive mission. So this is the Chola kingdom of Southern India, who it would seem, became annoyed at Srivijaya's attempts to perhaps tax their trade. So I guess you can draw some parallels between the conflict in Iran and the control of the Straits of Hormuz right now. And so the Chola sent, it appears to be a rather large armada and attacked and defeated Srivijaya. And they didn't stay, but certainly dealt a rather serious blow to Srivijaya, who then consequently did bounce back. But I think that they were appropriately chastised by the Chola.
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Yeah, I guess. So that the Chola expedition invasion fits maybe not totally, but the sort of colonizing concept a bit better than the broader sort of Indianization. But as you say, they're not there for very long.
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No, and just on that colonization aspect, I mean, there are inscriptions that do indicate that indeed there were entrepot that had Indian individuals living in them, and they had a very complex system of trade guilds as well. So there are hints to this in the inscriptional evidence about Indians actually settling and living within Southeast Asia. And certainly they were probably craftsmen who were brought to do bead production. So Berenice Bellina has been working in the Malay Peninsula and finding evidence that there were manufacturing centers there. And early on they probably were using skilled craftsmen from India in those. And eventually that was indigenized by. But certainly an interesting point.
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B
And is it correct that a lot of the evidence we have for Shri Vijaya comes from the Chinese records?
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C
Yeah, we owe such a huge debt to the very assiduous Chinese chroniclers. And I think that really adds a lot of depth and texture to the story that I'm trying to present in the book, because there's a lot of really interesting anecdotes that are recorded in the many Chinese histories that Spanish many, many centuries travelers and also official documents. And we can understand how the trade was working from the Chinese analysts.
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B
We can't ignore Java. So there's a big Javanese empire that develops around this time as well, Majapahit.
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C
Actually, I found this to be one of the more challenging aspects of the research because it is such a complex story and the rise of Majapahit in that part of the world. In the book, there's these maps that illustrate how complex that was and all of the different polities and then teasing out the information from the Chinese sources. On the rise of Majapahit and the competition that was going on because there's so many different names and they change over time. But certainly the monuments that are left behind there in Java are absolutely mind blowing and a beautiful competition or perhaps even coexistence between the different Indic religions with the marvelous Hindu temples in Prambanan and of course the incredible temple of Borobudur that remains there, fascinatingly only discovered in, I think was the 1800s buried underneath volcanic ash.
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B
You spent a lot of your career working on Cambodia and you devote, I think, two chapters to that country's early history. The first of these chapters looks at the pre Angkorian states of Afunan and Jenla. They would be, I guess, less well known to listeners. What do we know about them?
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C
I did work in Cambodia. I lived there for about seven years. I was very lucky to have such a long sojourn in that country. And it's really close to my heart. So my research there was on the. The Iron Age with the pre Angkorian period. So again, that research really drives home this foundation of political complexity already existing in Cambodia, just when they're beginning to get in touch with South India or South Asia rather. So Funan was probably one of the great examples of how Southeast Asian indigenous people benefited from this burgeoning globalizing trade that was stretching from the Mediterranean, in fact, but mostly driven by trade between India and China. And because the Fudan exists in what is today the Mekong Delta, and with the fortune of the monsoon trade winds, this was a natural place for traders to stop and call in. So they would have to reside there for a period while they waited for the winds to change and they could continue their journey either east or west. So Funan is, I think, best characterized as a very complex chiefdom, but they did begin to adopt a lot of Indian ideals. And we know this from not only the archaeology, of course, but also from the Chinese historical records of that period. So we find the development of an amazing capital at Angkor Borai that's been investigated by Cambodian and American archaeologists, but also the fabulous site of OK Ao in the Mekong Delta, which has more recently been excavated by Vietnamese and French archaeologists. So Funan is really the foundation of the rise of the great Khmer civilizations. And it transitions into another polity that the Chinese referred to as Jen language. Jen Lao is located in a different part of Cambodia. They moved upriver. So it's near Kompom Thom, which is just below the Great Lake. If you can picture that geography in your head. And at Indapura they established this fabulous capital, which you can still visit today. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site with these amazing brick temples that are covered with trees now and just a fabulous artifact of this burgeoning state.
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B
Of course, the most famous pre modern Southeast Asian state is Angkor. You've spent a lot of time working on Angkor. Can you tell us how our understanding of this civilization has changed over the recent decades of research?
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C
Sure. I think a lot of debt is owed to the major research that's been undertaken, in fact, by Australian archaeologists, working of course with Cambodian and French scholars and more recently with American scholars. We've come to learn an awful lot about Angkor. So Angkor again, evolves out of this Jinla polity and was established by a king called Jayavarman ii. And again, his name obviously has really indic tones. It's the protector of victory. So Jayavarman II in 802, which is usually the date that is given to the establishment of the state of Angkor, and it's an important date because this is Angkor is where it all clicks. It really, I would argue, becomes the first true mainland state in Southeast Asia. And he establishes himself as a divine king on the Kulen Hills, just north of where the temples of Angkor are. And this is another fascinating thing in talking about the discoveries that have been made. So Jebe Chavance and Damian Evans had collaborated doing lidar analysis of this Kulin massif in Siem Reap province. And that has just essentially stripped the forest away because the Kulin is extremely dangerous place to work because it was a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, it's littered with landmines. So it's a tricky place to work. And using lidar, they were able to expose the true nature of this huge city, Mahendra Paravata, that existed there. And this was the. The site of the first capital of Jayavarman ii, looking down on the plains of Angkor. So he established himself in an elaborate Hindu ceremony as a divine king. But also the evidence for these planned capitals and the establishment of real bureaucratic institutions arises then. And obviously Angkor lasts for many centuries, so the research is very large in its scope. But through that archaeological research, it's been possible to come to a greater understanding of the evolution and essentially the important role that the control of water played. So that's a thread that runs all the way through this book from the Iron Age sites of the northeast Thailand that I mentioned before, but also Iron Age sites that I and my colleagues have Excavated in Angkor itself. There's another moated site in Angkor called Pum La Via, and it's one of about three that are known. The other two haven't been excavated. So controlled water is really a really important part of this narrative of the evolution of political complexity in Southeast Asia.
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B
It's so exciting to hear about. There's still so much more research going on about Angkor and all these new discoveries improving our understanding of this. This amazing civilization. I think most of the listeners would have seen the pictures of Angkor as I did. I had the chance to go there a few years ago, and I was just absolutely blown away, as everyone is by it. It's just absolutely spectacular. And if anyone is listening, hasn't been, you really do have to go. One question that always gets raised is, what happened to Angkor? There's a great civilization, then it just seems to fade and not totally disappear, but it comes to an end reasonably quickly. What happens to it?
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C
I think that again, we can sort of go back to environmental factors to a degree, but the environment is only one part of that. There are indicators that Angkor was heavily impacted by a changing environment with the shifts in the monsoon and also a decline in the maintenance of their water management. So again, water management play is such an essential part in not only the rise and maintenance, but also essentially the collapse of some of these civilizations. Now, of course, Angkor didn't disappear. The people continued to live there. But the center of political power did shift in Cambodia. And Cambodia was in competition, of course, with not only certain aspects of the Cham who were in southern Vietnam, but also with the Vietnamese and also with the. The Thai kingdoms and perhaps even further afield. So there was a lot of political pressure and military pressure, but also changes in the climate in that time period in the early 15th century were bringing critical pressure on that civilization, which basically meant that their area of political control contracted considerably. And eventually they moved down to the southern part of the. Around Phnom Penh and various capitals there. Another area which is actually beginning to get some attention, which is interesting by, again, Australian archaeologists.
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B
Towards the end of the book, you discuss the development of polities in what is now Vietnam. And that is one policy or group of polities which some listeners may not have been familiar with. The charm kingdoms in Central and South Vietnam and Dai Viet in the north.
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C
Yeah, and again, this was another one of the very challenging parts of doing the research, getting a grip on the development of especially Vietnam. So Vietnam was essentially under the hegemony of the Chinese for a very long period of time. But eventually they were able to begin to establish their own independence. So the Vietnamese based up in the BAC Bo region, and, of course, a huge corpus of archaeological evidence establishing the Vietnamese living in that area for a very, very long time. But to their south were a polity known as Champa. So this, again, is a really difficult polity to understand. There's not a lot of archaeological research done on it, and the written resources that we have are often conflicting. So trying to get a picture of what Champa was like is really quite difficult. But archaeology has, again, provided a lot of assistance in trying to figure that out. So the Cham were, again, Hinduized. They also embraced Buddhism at certain points as well. So it appears that there were probably, like Dvaravati and the Pew States, a unified culture, but divided political entities that occupied the various river valleys down the coast of Vietnam. So from about halfway up Vietnam all the way down to the Mekong Delta were Chamek polities. And there's a lot of turmoil, and one polity seems to come more powerful and then loses power, and it shifts to a different polity. And they were also. Individually, these polities were aligned with the Khmer at various points. So the. The Cham actually captured Angkor at one point. And if you go to the Bayonne, one of the really amazing depictions there, if you look at the battle scenes on that temple, the Bayonne was built by Jayavarman vii, and he celebrates his victory over the Cham. But if you look carefully at those, you can see that Jayavarman's soldiers are fighting alongside other Cham soldiers who are fighting Cham warriors. So there was probably an alliance between one of the Cham kingdoms against another Cham kingdom by Jayavarman vii. So a really complex situation there. And then, of course, the Vietnamese went from strength to strength. The Chinese tried many times to reassert their hegemony and through their military genius in many cases, there's some really. You know, the great stories of them hiding sharpened stakes in the riverbeds so the Chinese ships would founder and then defeating them are some of the more interesting aspects of in the book. But eventually, the Vietnamese began to expand and put pressure on the Cham and really eventually absorbed all of the territory that was held by the Cham. But again, those monuments are still there, and they're fabulous to visit. You can see these gorgeous Cham towers up and down the coast of Vietnam that are a testament to the impact of Indian ideals on the rise of these polities.
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B
And am I. Right. In saying that the Cham belonged more to the sort of Malay Indonesian world rather than to the Sinaitic world of the North.
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C
Yeah. It's very difficult to establish beyond doubt what the origins of the Cham are, but there is strong evidence that they probably are related to a preceding culture called Sahwin. That is, archaeological sites have been excavated, so they probably were more Austronesian, so they belong to that cultural world of Malaysia. And of course, the Austronesians are prolific expanders across the Pacific. So in that language family would be where the Cham sit.
- [40:19]
B
Maybe zooming out now, I was wondering if you could give us. This might be a bit difficult, but to give us a sort of a broad picture of the state of archeology in Southeast Asia sort of right now where the. Where sort of the most sort of exciting research is being done. And maybe also. So within Southeast Asia, are you getting indigenous Southeast Asians or local Southeast Asians starting to take the lead in archaeological research?
- [40:46]
C
Oh, absolutely. Over the last 20 years, Southeast Asian archeology has really blossomed, and a lot of that is due to indigenous Southeast Asians working in that country. And they're amazing archaeologists. Look, I work shoulder to shoulder with Cambodians and Thais and Lao archaeologists, and their skill set is incredible. So they really are driving the understanding of their nations. And the pride that they have in uncovering that history and that that lost story is so inspiring to me. So there's, I mean, lots and lots of really interesting research going on. And, I mean, I'm just eternally grateful for being offered the opportunity to work alongside these great scholars and archaeologists. So in Cambodia, there's ongoing research on Angkor and certainly the Khmer authorities there. If you follow anything on the posts from the Apsara Authority or the Prevahir Authority, there's always fantastic, excellent archaeological research being conducted, new finds, and also, of course, the continued efforts to rejuvenate a lot of these temples, or conserve them, I should say, rather. Which is really inspiring.
- [41:59]
B
Yeah, it is. It just sounds so exciting. Look, sadly, we run out of time, but before we conclude, this is for listeners who can't see. It's a big book, it's a very complex book, and I imagine you spend a lot of time researching and writing it. But can I ask if you are working on a new project and whether you might be able to give us a glimpse of what your next project is?
- [42:19]
C
Oh, sure. Well, my research partner, Louise Xuan, who's at the University of Melbourne, and I have just completed an installation in the Xin Kuang Museum. So we've been displaying the finds from our excavations over the past 10 years at the Plain of Jars.
- [42:36]
B
And that museum is, sorry, where?
- [42:39]
C
In Xin Kuang in Laos. Yeah. So we've been working at the Plain of Jars trying to understand the evolution of those enigmatic sites. And part of that is to put on display for the public the excavation findings. So we're planning other museum exhibitions as well as part of a new Australian Research Council funded project. And part of that also, we'll be expanding our research from Laos. In Laos, we're looking at the menhirs, or standing stones of Huapan, which is to the north of the Plain of Jars, and then also working with colleagues in India to investigate the strikingly similar stone jars and menhirs that are found there. So there's a really interesting connection between Assam in India and Northern Laos.
- [43:29]
B
Southeast Asian archaeology sounds like such an exciting field to be in right now. Dougal O'Reilly, thank you very much for joining us on this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss your new book, Empires of the Southern Ocean, Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia. It's just been published by Bloomsbury Academic.
- [43:50]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
- [43:53]
B
And you've been listening to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. We're a podcast channel on the excellent New Books Network. Thanks everyone, as always, for listening. You can download or stream this interview and thousands more free of charge via the New Books Network website or itunes. Sa.