The notion of an integrated Southeast Asian space has long been advocated by Braudel-inspired historians such as Anthony Reid, who argued that long-established interconnections within the South China Sea likely extending back to prehistory account for the region's strong spatial and human integration (Reid, 1988: 1–10). And indeed, studies now pulling together archaeological sciences, genetics and linguistics provide accumulating records of sustained networks through which desired artefacts were shared by the late Pleistocene, ca. ~ 20 kya (Bellwood, 2007, Blench, 2017, Brandão et al., 2016, Bulbeck, 2008, Soares et al., 2008, Soares et al., 2016). In parallel, the Bay of Bengal has also been increasingly understood as a unifying space within which littoral populations had been knitting relations and developing shared cultural references (Amrith, 2013) as early as the late prehistoric period (in Southeast Asia) and the early historical period (in South Asia) (Kulke, 1990), and perhaps as early as the Neolithic (Gupta, 2005).

As a natural crossroad between these two basins, the Thai-Malay peninsula developed ports from the mid-first millennium BCE. These became meeting places for merchants, religious men and mariners staying there waiting for the change of monsoon. They also developed into large industrials centres, receiving materials and technologies, hosting foreign artisans and producing hybrid goods (Bellina et al., 2014). These port-settlements developed as favoured cultural cradles within which culturally hybrid concepts and products were elaborated and diffused in both maritime basins. During this period, several communities along the South China Sea came to share a set of desirable goods such as Dong Son drums, Sa Huynh-Kalanay-related ceramics, nephrite lingling-o, carnelian and glass beads, high-tin bronze bowls, etc. (Bellina, 2001, Bellina, 2007, Bellina, 2017a, Bellina, 2017b, Bellina, 2017d, Glover, 2015, Hung et al., 2013, Solheim, 2006). Except for Sa Huynh-Kalanay ceramics, those goods were interpreted as mere imports until a decade ago when technological analysis began to suggest that some of the emblematic ones, the hard stone ornaments, were made locally with foreign techniques and adapted to local taste (Bellina, 2001, Bellina, 2007). Since then, research has generated increasing evidence that these widespread objects were most often locally made, combining imported motifs and shapes (Flavel, 1997), exotic materials (Carter, 2015, Carter and Dussubieux, 2016, Hung and Bellwood, 2010, Hung, 2017) and skilled exogenous techniques that originated in South Asia and East Asia (Bellina, 2001, Bellina, 2003, Bellina, 2007, Bellina et al., 2012, Bouvet, 2011, Dussubieux and Bellina, 2017, Favereau, 2015, Favereau and Bellina, 2016, Pryce et al., 2017). The hybrid nature of these products reveals that social and political interactions within and between societies of the two sea basins during late prehistoric periods were much more complex and dynamic than expected. In addition to industries, one might consider the possibility that as early as this period, similar processes of cultural hybridisation may already have influenced urban conceptions across the South China Sea region (Bellina, 2017a, Bellina, 2017b).

Traditionally, both in South and in Southeast Asia, the study of the development of early states and cities has predominantly concerned large-scale agrarian polities. In contrast, much less consideration has been given to the political organisation and the forms of urbanism that smaller coastal polities developed along the littorals of the two sea basins during the late first millennium BCE and the first millennium CE (Bellina (in press-b)). Southeast Asian port-cities have been well described for the historical period (Lombard, 1970, Lombard, 1988, Miksic, 2000, Reid, 2000). The prehistoric and early historical port-of-trade forms of urbanism remain to be revealed. As an example, I have argued that the cosmopolitan walled port of Khao Sam Kaeo in the Thai-Malay Peninsula was an early urban settlement whose configuration may relate both to coastal South Asian and Southeast Asian traditions (Bellina (in press-a)). This and other prehistoric coastal trading polities developed complex political and urban configurations at the same time as other Southeast Asian land-based emerging states (Bellina (in press-a)) such as at Co Loa (Kim, 2013, Kim, 2015) and at Angkor Borei (Stark, 2006, Stark, 2015), in what is now Vietnam and Cambodia, respectively.

การขุดค้นทางโบราณคดีที่เขาสก พ.ศ.2556 และ2557

การขุดค้นทางโบราณคดีที่เขาสามแก้ว พ.ศ.2548-2552