| Abstract: |
Island Southeast Asia has several distinctive elements of its archaeological and documentary record that make it a particularly fertile region in which to further explore and develop theories of culture contact and cross-cultural interaction. In contrast to the traditional view of other regions, such as pre-European contact North America, archaeologists have always seen Island Southeast Asia as a zone of cross-cultural interaction, or as a passageway for migrations to other areas. Despite this potential, the region remains relatively under-explored archaeologically, and problems of cross-cultural interaction have not been the orientation for most of the archaeological research that has been done. There are several possible explanations for this relative lack of focus: this paper will review several case studies that demonstrate how additional research can contribute to general theory about the interaction of human social groups.
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