Over the last decade or so several attempts have been made to come to grips with the problem of how and when the early states of Southeast Asia first developed. Most of the more prominent essays have focused largely or exclusively upon the first states of the mainland. The maritime region has been less well served, due partly to the paucity and intractability of the data, and partly to the fact that most scholars dealing with the early history of the maritime region are still struggling to produce adequate descriptions of the states of the later first millennium A.D., well after the first states were founded. Although a number of studies have dealt in passing with aspects of the question, and others have focused upon the earliest states in limited portions of the region, no overview of the ideas concerning state formation in the region has yet been produced. This essay represents a preliminary attempt to redress the balance between the maritime and mainland portions of Southeast Asia, by providing a brief survey of some of the views, assumptions and models that have arisen in literature on the early history of the maritime region, and by reviewing the data - some very recently
published - available for the study of the late prehistoric and early historic periods in the area. Given the numbers of polities and periods which might be covered by a general study of state formation in the maritime region, and the need to keep the survey reasonably compact, this outline will be confined to covering the very earliest states which formed in the area - those that appeared early in the first millennium A.D., or perhaps somewhat earlier, in the Malay-speaking portion of the Malay peninsula and in the western portion of the Indonesian archipelago settled by a number of groups speaking related Malayo-Polynesian languages. It is hoped that the ideas and data presented here will stimulate discussion and further research concerning the very early phases of political history of the islands and the peninsula.