| Abstract: |
Southeast Asian history is dominated by phenomena, such as trade and religious conversion, that are both global and local in scale (i.e., glocal). Archaeologists have frequently understood trade to be the cause of social and cultural change across Southeast Asia, particularly the regional ‘Urban Revolution’ which took place during the first millennium CE. This paper presents a multiscalar investigation that questions this assumption by reconceptualizing the relationships between glocal phenomena and settlement forms in ancient and Medieval Southeast Asia (100-1300 CE). Focusing on the Malay Peninsula, a part of the region thought to be most affected by global influences, this paper demonstrates that relationships between global trade and local settlement behaviours are not deterministic, offering an example of how multiscalar or glocal analyses can disrupt deterministic explanations of the archaeological record and enhance understanding of the interactions between the global and local scales of human activity.
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