| Abstract: |
Port-cities that developed with the maritime Silk Roads can be regarded as active agents of what are now considered previous globalisations. This book is about Khao Sam Kaeo, one of those nodes which emerged along the eastern coast of the Thai-Malay Peninsula where Southeast Asia integrated the maritime Silk Roads. Its excavation from 2005 to 2009 and the multi-disciplinary research conducted on its materials, shed light on what I argue to be the earliest port-city identified so far in the South China Sea, which has also been a seat for many cultural experimentations. This enclosed settlement, the earliest identified so far in this maritime basin, whose cosmopolitan configuration is reflected both by its urbanism and industries, thrived from the 4th to the 1st century BC. It developed at a time when circumnavigation around the Peninsula was probably not yet taking place and transisthmian routes in this part of the Kra Isthmus were predominantly used, passing through a series of river valleys, linking the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. At the exit of transpeninsular routes, this node hosted foreign communities, staying within quarters materialised by embankments, received commodities and cultural elements
it also produced hybrid cultural generated that were redistributed from one basin to the other, thus contributing to the cultural process. (sic) Khao Sam Kaeo prefigured some of the pre-modern trading societies and their entrepôts such as the Malays in Srivijaya and in Melaka, the Acehenese in Aceh in Sumatra, the Makassarese and the Makasar in Sulawesi and Sulu Sultanate of the Philippines. The ulti-ethnic settlement of Khao Sam Kaeo hosted hybrid industries associating artisans, technologies and styles of various Asian horizons producing goods feeding different networks and serving different socio-political strategies of its actors. Some may correspond to a trans-ethnic South China Sea network culture shared by communities located along the fringe of the South China Sea. The elaboration of a shared cultural matrix results from an intensive as well as an extensive connectivity within the South China Sea, probably from the Neolithic. This cultural matrix was driven by shared common socio-political practices that perpetuated even when, evolving in time, it began to adapt foreign vocabulary coming from further-away "lands." It is this maritime network cultural matrix and its interplay with new foreign elements brought in with the maritime Silk Roads that this volume proposes to explore in the light of this settlement and the industries it hosted. In total, all the research conducted and presented here shed new light on some of the economic and socio-political process at the core of one previous integrations that the followed the setting of the maritime Silk Road. (sic)
|
