Before Siam: Essays in Art and Archaeology. Nicolas Revire and Stephen A. Murphy, eds. Bangkok: River Books, 2014. 432 pp, 312 color illustrations, 56 maps and plans, Notes, Bibliographies, Index. US $49.95. ISBN 9786167339412.

Abstract

The millennium-long period that began c. 500 B.C.E. has long vexed Southeast Asian archaeologists and historians for its odd mix of archaeological, documentary, and art historical data that mark a change from the prehistoric period to one recorded by local and visiting historians. We still struggle to understand this period, called variously the Iron Age, the protohistoric period, the Early Historic period, or simply Early South East Asia (with credit to Smith and Watson 1979), during which Southeast Asians embraced profound organizational and ideological transformations (Murphy and Stark 2016). Indianization, Hindicization, localization, Sanskritization: each of these terms captures some elements of settlement, subsistence, and political dynamics of the time. Yet each term reflects an outsider perspective; it is only in the last few decades that archaeologists and art historians have buckled down to do the hard work of understanding the material record of this “millennium-long no-man’s land” from the bottom up (Manguin 2011:xvi).