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Presented in absentia by Nyein Lwin Introduction: All periods, cities, states or nations have something that has gone before. In Central Myanmar, the Pyu civilisation of the first millennium AD, with its extensive walled cities of Sriksetra, Beikthano, Halin and Maingmaw, which are well known to scholars (Stargardt 1990), must have come from smaller beginnings. We may not yet have found all the Pyu cities or Pyu sites. So we need study more of the protohistory or prehistory of Myanmar. Formerly, it was Myanmar peoples understanding that the Pyu period went from the 1st century A.D. to about the end of the 9th century A.D. But Pyu can be seen as a name for a national people, not just a historical period. We can look for their origins in the Neolithic or Bronze Ages. Many archaeologists have studied the Pyu sites on the eastern side of the Ayeyarwady River. But we have now located and excavated a Pyu site on the western side of the Ayeyarwady that contained brick buildings and inhumation burials with grave goods. It is called Letpanywa (LPY). This paper is a summary of two departmental reports on the excavations that were written in Burmese (Nyein Lwin 2002, 2003).
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