The Routledge Handbook of Bioarchaeology in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands

Marc Oxenham, Hallie Buckley, Marc Oxenham, Hallie Buckley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138778184
• eBook ISBN: 9781317534006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

In recent years the bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands has seen enormous progress. This new and exciting research is synthesised, contextualised and expanded upon in The Routledge Handbook of Bioarchaeology in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

The volume is divided into two broad sections, one dealing with mainland and island Southeast Asia, and a second section dealing with the Pacific islands. A multi-scalar approach is employed to the bio-social dimensions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands with contributions alternating between region and/or site specific scales of operation to the individual or personal scale. The more personal level of osteobiographies enriches the understanding of the lived experience in past communities.

Including a number of contributions from sub-disciplinary approaches tangential to bioarchaeology the book provides a broad theoretical and methodological approach. Providing new information on the globally relevant topics of farming, population mobility, subsistence and health, no other volume provides such a range of coverage on these important themes.

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Bioarchaeology in Southeast Asia and the Pacific

Hallie R. Buckley and Marc Oxenham

A decade ago Cambridge University Press published an edited volume by Oxenham and Tayles (2006) The Bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia. This contribution was instrumental in nurturing and catalysing a whole new generation of bioarchaeological research. Many of the key theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the human past through the contexts of skeletal and dental remains used in this region today were developed and popularised by that work. Nonetheless, we are ten years on and a lot has changed: different questions are being asked, different methodological approaches have become de rigueur, new exciting sites throughout the region have been discovered and a new bioarchaeological awakening is occurring.

This volume intends to take maximum advantage of these developments and changes and fills a growing lacuna in our knowledge of the diverse ways and manners in which humans adapted biologically and socio-culturally to and during major transformative events in antiquity. This Handbook is a culmination of nearly a decade of bioarchaeological research in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands and showcases research findings from a wide breadth of inter-related disciplines. Moreover, we have extended the traditional bioarchaeological approach here to include the use of faunal analyses and ancient DNA as novel ways of providing a backdrop to the more traditional skeletal analyses usually reported.

In the Oxenham and Tayles (2006) volume there was only one chapter covering health and disease in the Pacific region (Buckley, 2006). In the last ten years, the bioarchaeology of early colonisers in the Pacific Islands has seen enormous progress with the discovery and re-excavation of cemetery sites from this period of initial human discovery and settlement. Of particular note is the unearthing of the Teouma site in Vanuatu that has yielded the largest sample of Lapita-associated skeletons ever discovered (see Sand and Bedford, 2010). Hallie Buckley and colleagues have applied multi-disciplinary methods to assessing diet, health and disease in the Teouma sample and much of this research is synthesised and integrated into a broader context in various chapters of this volume. While specific to the Pacific, the discovery and rigorous analysis of colonising peoples anywhere in the world is extremely rare and is therefore potentially of interest to scholars working outside of the immediate region.

Arguably the most significant and far-reaching events in human prehistory have been the development of farming and the colonisation of virgin lands. Southeast Asia and the Pacific are unique in hosting both of these world-changing events within a relatively short time of each other: the Southeast Asian Neolithic revolution and the Lapita colonisation of the Pacific.

Climate change, rising sea levels, food shortages, environmental destruction and deforestation are terms that all of us are familiar with today. Many of us are perhaps a little more than anxious about the future for ourselves and our children. How will we cope with such enormous changes to our immediate landscapes and world at large? What sort of social changes and disruption do future generations have in store? Will we adapt to these changes and, if so, how will these adaptations occur biosocially? While this volume is certainly not intended to deal directly with such issues, these are exactly the same problems and questions faced by the ancient inhabitants of mainland and island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In this sense, the way in which people and communities thousands of years ago adapted to and dealt with such fundamental concerns has relevance to us today. We cannot escape our connections to the past, and indeed there may be the germs of useful advice in the stories told by these long gone peoples.

As part of the rationale for developing this edited volume, we sought to craft a contribution that meets the rigorous scholarly needs and requirements of the research audience with interest in these regions, but also offered excitement and engagement to those not familiar with the field. To this end, we were very careful who we invited to present chapters and have been very explicit in the sort of approach and content we required of each contribution. While we have clearly selected contributors from a range of scholarly backgrounds and academic levels, we have been careful to tailor their skills and experience to specific contributions. The volume is divided into two broad sections, the first dealing with mainland (MSEA) and island (ISEA) Southeast Asia, and the second section dealing with the Pacific Islands. Both sections are introduced with detailed and substantive contextualising chapters, followed by a series of chapters dealing with regional overviews, methodological advances and specific problems in human biosocial adaptation in the region at large.

As a device to better engage the audience, we have specifically asked contributors to deal with differing scales of human adaptation. In other words, this volume employs a multi-scalar approach to explication of the biosocial dimensions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Contributions vary between region and/or site-specific scales of operation down to the individual or personal scale.

The volume comprises 29 substantive chapters. To orient the reader, there are two regional maps for Southeast Asia: one for mainland (Figure 2.1) and one for island (Figure 2.2) Southeast Asia provided in Chapter 2 The population history of mainland and island Southeast Asia, and a map of the relevant regions and island groups in the Pacific (Figure 17.1) presented in Chapter 17 Bioarchaeology in the Pacific Islands: A temporal and geographical examination of nutritional and infectious disease.

Geographically our study areas are defined as follows. MSEA includes southern China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Peninsula Malaysia (Myanmar is not covered in this volume). ISEA includes islands in the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos in addition to Borneo. Wallacea is a biogeographical region defined as those islands east of the Wallace line (i.e. east of Bali and south of Mindanao but including Sulawesi), extending to, but excluding, Australia and New Guinea. There is overlap, in our definition of these regions, between parts of ISEA and Wallacea.

Near Oceania, a region which includes New Guinea, is bounded to the east by the eastern end of the Solomon Islands, denoting the beginning of Remote Oceania. Melanesia includes New Guinea and the south-western islands beyond with the most eastern island being Fiji. Micronesia encompasses the archipelagos of small islands to the north of the Melanesian islands with a roughly similar eastern boundary to each other. Polynesia is the largest region and encompasses all islands east of Fiji, extends to Rapanui (Easter Island) and includes New Zealand in the south.

Part I: Mainland and island Southeast Asia

We include 15 chapters from Southeast Asia covering topics as wide ranging as cremation to stable isotope research on diet and migration. The Southeast Asian half of the volume is further divided into MSEA and ISEA sections covering broad but inter-related themes.

MSEA themes

Two chapters provide regional overviews of core issues, with Marc Oxenham and Hallie Buckley (Chapter 2) exploring the population history of MSEA and ISEA from the perspective of human skeletal and ancient DNA analyses for the most part. This synthesis is then complemented by a review of the current state of knowledge of human adaptation in the wider region in which Philip Piper (Chapter 3) draws on the archaeological evidence of technological and cultural change from the terminal Pleistocene to the Mid-Holocene. Dougald O’Reilly and Louise Shewan then explore social aspects of mortuary traditions in Cambodia (Chapter 4), placing this evidence within the context of the wider geographical region.

At the more personal level, or lowest denominator of scale, the second thematic device of using osteobiographies to enrich our understanding of the lived experience in past communities, so successfully utilised by Stodder and Palkovich’s (2012) The Bioarchaeology of Individuals, is employed. Traditionally, and as was the case with the Oxenham and Tayles (2006) volume, for the most part only regional or site-specific scales of approach have been published to date in Southeast Asia. Kate Domett et al. (Chapter 5) add to this growing corpus of osteobiographical research with a detailed account of the biosocial context of a single female Bronze Age individual from the site of Ban Non Wat in northeast Thailand. Multiple lines of investigation are employed here, integrating macroscopic evidence of health and disease with isotopic data reflecting diet and childhood residence and the cultural context of the burial. Lorna Tilley and Marc Oxenham (Chapter 6) then expand on previously published accounts of a disabled individual from Man Bac in Neolithic Vietnam, shedding further light on the society he lived in and his place (and interactions) within it.

Chapters within the third theme interrogate population-based issues of the past in MSEA from a data-driven perspective. First, Damien Huffer and Marc Oxenham (Chapter 7) use body size and enthesis development correlated with isotope data of childhood residence to investigate associations between activity and mobility, and changes in these variables, from pre-Neolithic foraging communities (Con Co Ngua) to mixed farming and forager communities in the Neolithic (Man Bac) of northern Vietnam. Anna Willis and Marc Oxenham (Chapter 8) also use stable isotope analyses to reconstruct diet in other Vietnamese samples in order to address questions of subsistence change in southern Vietnam from the Neolithic through to Metal Ages. Finally, the health and disease of infants and children from several sites in Thailand, which span the period of the introduction of farming through the periods of agricultural intensification, is investigated by Siân Halcrow et al. (Chapter 9). Here they attempt to gain a deeper understanding of this critical development, the rise and intensification of farming, affecting populations during the Holocene on a global scale.

The methodological framework for addressing demographic questions is the focus of two chapters addressing the third theme of this section of the volume (Chapters 10 and 11). While the chapters are region specific in their primary focus, these methodological innovations may be applied to any region of the world. Ken Ross and Marc Oxenham (Chapter 10) explore methods for identifying biosocially constructed age categories, specifically the elderly, and how such an approach can explicate otherwise invisible aspects of social identity in Non Nok Tha, Thailand. Nancy Tayles and Siân Halcrow (Chapter 11) offer a detailed description, and theoretical foundation, of the basis for estimation of age at death in adolescents and adults from mortuary samples using Ban Non Wat, Thailand, as a case in point. Finally, Stacey Ward and Nancy Tayles (Chapter 12) provide an overview of the sociocultural aspects of cremation in Southeast Asia, focussing on a case study of burnt human remains from a historic site in Laos, and placing this methodological analysis within the wider regional context.

ISEA themes

The four remaining Southeast Asian chapters are analyses of topical issues in ISEA, focussing mainly on how mortuary practices may inform us on wider biosocial aspects of past communities. Lindsay Lloyd-Smith et al. (Chapter 13) provide an update on recent isotopic and mortuary practices from Niah cave, Borneo. Here they use the biosocial data from human burials to enquire about social affiliations and change within the community over time. Nathaniel Harris et al. (Chapter 14) then apply archaeothanatological principles to burial treatment in a rare example of Neolithic human burials from the site of Pain Haka in the Nusa Tenggara province of eastern Flores Island, Indonesia. This chapter attempts to place the mortuary practices of the Pain Haka people within the broader geographic and temporal context between MSEA and the Pacific Islands. Following on the mortuary practices theme, Marc Oxenham et al. (Chapter 15) provide the first report on issues of biosocially constructed age and burial treatment in the late Neolithic to Metal Age burials from the Nagsabaran site from Luzon in the Philippines. This account also demonstrates possible ideological connections as reflected in mortuary treatment between ISEA and Lapita and their descendants in the Pacific Islands. Finally, Myra Lara et al. (Chapter 16) explore the issue of debates over pre-Austronesian subsistence economies in ISEA in the context of a detailed analysis of health and disease in c.9,000 BP cremation bundle burials in Ille Cave, Palawan, the Philippines.

Part II: The Pacific Islands

There are four complementary themes in this section of the volume enc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Bioarchaeology in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword by Clark Spencer Larsen
• A Dedication
• 1 Bioarchaeology in Southeast Asia and the Pacific
• Part I Mainland and Island Southeast Asia
• Part II The Pacific Islands
• Index