| Abstract: |
Khao Sam Kaeo appeared as a cradle for a form of cosmopolitan urbanism, a model better known in later Historical port-cities of the South China Sea. A combination of sources of inspiration and a broad regional trend towards larger nucleated settlements hosting stratified societies should be taken into consideration. Khao Sam Kaeo, with what has been interpreted as a political centeralisation, may also represent early experimentation in the development of the city-State type of governance. Khao Sam Kaeo may have been one of these cradles for an early city-State culture, an early culture that may have developed at that early time among Môn-Khmer-speaking groups in Western Southeast Asia. Furhter investigation should highlight whether this city-State was standing alone or whetehr it was part of a federation composed of one city-State dominating numbers of smaller dependent city-States. Another result is to demonstrate that the region became specialised in the industrial production of goods feeding networks and implementing both local and imported raw materials and technologies. These industries and their craftsmen were producing goods to satisfy the needs of different economic and political networks. The strategies of harnessing the specialists' expertise probably played a crucial role in the development of the region, through the emulation, in the Peninsula's trade-oriented polities, of specialties and techniques introduced from other trade-oriented polities in both South and Southeast Asia. These industries and in particular hard stone ornament industries and their products illustrate a core characteristic of this South China Sea network culture -- its capacity to adopt and exaggerate any foreign innovations that were deemed useful for socio-political strategies. A similar trend was observed at later sites and in particular at Oc Eo, one of the two capitals of the state of Funan (Bourdonneau 2010). Future research may tell us whether Funan may have been the successor to an earlier city-State culture developed during the last centuries of the 1st millennium BC of Môn-Khmer within the early trade polities of the Thai-Malay Peninsula.
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