| Abstract: |
The Palaeolithic cultural assemblage of Myanmar offers two main reasons to motivate archaeologistsÂ’ interest. The first is the location of the country, which lies at an intermediate geographical position between South and Southeast Asia. Ever since scholars discovered the remains of Homo erectus in both China and Indonesia, Myanmar has been considered as one of the possible early human migration routes from continental to insular Southeast Asia. This was the main reason the American Southeast Asiatic Expedition for Early Man conducted work in the central belt of the country (de Terra et al., 1943: 267). Moreover, recent studies (Oppenheinmer, 2009
Marwick, 2009) based on genetic (Macaulay et al., 2005
Li et al., 2015) and geographic analyses (Field, Petraglia, and Lahr, 2007) have proposed that Myanmar was likely as one of the important routes for early human dispersal from west to southeast in Asia. The second reason is the stone tool assemblages of Myanmar themselves, since these tools are attributed to the Palaeolithic, and they play an important role in correlating archaeological data with early human activities and migration. These assemblages differ from each other in terms of their locations, raw material usage, typologies, and environmental contexts. The aim of this paper is to summarize the characteristics of stone tool assemblages in Myanmar and to examine their cultural affinities and technological links within their local and regional contexts.
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