| Abstract: |
Southeast Asias earliest cities emerged by the mid-first millennium CE after more than one thousand years growth toward urbanism and complexity. These early cities appeared both on the coasts and in river networks
their inhabitants engaged in trade and agriculture, and selectively embraced urban and religious concepts from neighboring cultures with which they interacted. This chapter examines competing arguments for how and why cities first appeared in Southeast Asia, their timing, scale, and form. Despite heterogeneity in urban pattern, early Southeast Asian cities shared key structural features in configuration and social construction that reflect pan-regional ideological systems. Fewer urban forms arose in insular Southeast Asia compared with the mainland, and they emerged later in time
selected examples are also included for comparison. Early Southeast Asian urban systems were participants in the process Sanskrit cosmopolitanism (sensu Pollock), but a growing body of archaeological research identifies regionalization in urban form that distinguished even the earliest Southeast Asian cities them from their South Asian counterparts.
|
