via Primary Sources and Asian Pasts, 2020: A new Open Access paper/chapter by Miriam Stark.
Profound social transformations took place across South and Southeast Asia during the early first millennium CE, incorporating new religious and philosophical ideologies across the Old World. Conventional Southeast Asian scholarship uses documentary sources and art history to explain the origins of first-millennium CE developments, when temple-based Brahmanic and Buddhist religions, international trade networks, and the region’s earliest cities emerged. Archaeological research documents Southeast Asians’ materialization of indigenous and South Asian ideas in their construction of politico-ritual places and goods that linked these landscapes into broader interactional landscapes from the mid- to late third to the early seventh centuries CE: the Gupta period in South Asia. Researchers have delved into contemporary developments west and northwest of the Gupta epicenter to understand pan-regional developments during the first millennium CE.1 Expanding our vision eastward to Southeast Asia, whose concurrent developments have conventionally been attributed to “Hindicization” or “Indianization,”2 also contextualizes the Gupta Age and offers insights on panregional developments during the first millennium CE. Brahmanic structures that housed Indic gods offer chronological anchors and define geographic limits of new ideologies; urban scale and settling along trade routes yield demographic insights, and artifact provenances define interactional space. Such information is essential to interrogating environmental history and material matters.
