The settlement of Ban Non Wat charts the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in north-eastern Thailand. Examination of grave inclusions and mortuary treatment at this important site allows insights into social change during this key period. Increasing complexity and the inclusion of exotic items in the mortuary treatment of some individuals early in the Bronze Age is suggested to show the rise of a lineage of aggrandisers who controlled access to these symbolic articles. But, the author argues, their elevated status was ephemeral, forfeited as local bronze casting became established.

Although first identified 120 years ago, knowledge of the Toalean technoculture of Middle Holocene Sulawesi, Indonesia, remains limited. Previous research has emphasised the exploitation of largely terrestrial resources by hunter-gatherers on the island. The recent recovery of two modified tiger shark teeth from the Maros-Pangkep karsts of South Sulawesi, however, offers new insights. The authors combine use-wear and residue analyses with ethnographic and experimental data to indicate the use of these artefacts as hafted blades within conflict and ritual contexts, revealing hitherto undocumented technological and social practices among Toalean hunter-gatherers. The results suggest these artefacts constitute some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the use of shark teeth in composite weapons.

Climate change is often cited in the ‘collapse’ of complex societies and linked to agricultural resilience or lack thereof. In this article, the authors consider how demand affected agricultural strategies as farmers navigated the transformations of the Late Harappan phase (c. 1900–1700 BC) of the Indus tradition. Through the modelling of monocropping/multicropping, low/high yield crops, and supply-driven versus flexible production, various economic, environmental and social demands are explored with reference to the choices of farmers and how these decisions differed regionally, and how they impacted the wider Late Harappan de-urbanisation process. The authors’ archaeobotanical perspective on the Indus contributes to wider understanding of how urban societies and their agricultural bases change over time.

One defining characteristic of Homo sapiens is the production and use of personal ornamentation. Evidence from Africa and western Eurasia has dominated discussion, but a growing number of finds directs attention towards Island Southeast Asia. In this article, the authors report on an assemblage of Nautilus shell beads from the Indonesian cave site of Makpan, Alor Island. The highly standardised forms, mostly with two perforations, and evidence of use wear, indicate that these beads were utilised as appliqués. Dating to the terminal Pleistocene, these beads appear to form part of a wider tradition also attested on Timor and Kisar, suggesting an early inter-island network across southern Wallacea.

Human burials have been recovered from a wide variety of intra- and extramural settlement contexts at Neolithic period sites (3000–1200 BC) in southern India, yet formal cemeteries remain virtually unknown from this period. Research at MARP-79 in the Raichur District of the south Indian state of Karnataka, near the type-site of Maski, documents a large Neolithic cemetery, now with the largest number of radiometrically dated burials of any archaeological site in southern India. The cemetery demonstrates considerable, previously undocumented variation in mortuary ritual, involving new materials, technologies and burial practices, which challenge culture-historical models, pointing instead towards long-term incremental developments that alter how we understand the emergence of Neolithic social differences.

In 2019, an ethnographic survey of Indian workshops and shops producing and selling putalis (Venetian ducats and their imitations) was conducted in Nashik, Maharashtra. The study, supplemented by information from written and documentary sources, provides observations relevant to archaeologists studying the process of reinterpreting Roman coin design in Early Historic India.

Music likely played an important role within prehistoric societies but can be challenging to study in the absence of evidence for musical instruments. Here, the authors present two deer antlers recovered from the early Metal Age site of Go O Chua in southern Vietnam. A detailed examination of the artefacts, including evidence for use-wear, combined with insights from ethnographic analogies, leads the authors to conclude that the artefacts were single-stringed musical instruments. At least 2000 years old, the Go O Chua artefacts would be the earliest-known examples of chordophones from the region and indicate a long musical tradition. Their identification gives impetus to archaeo-musicological research in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Research on prehistoric mainland Southeast Asia is dominated by mortuary contexts, leaving processes such as the transition to sedentism relatively understudied. Recent excavations in southern Vietnam, however, have recovered new evidence for settlement. The authors report on investigations at the neolithic site of Loc Giang (3980–3270 cal BP) in southern Vietnam, where excavation revealed a vertical sequence of more than 30 surfaces. Microarchaeological analyses indicate that these features are carefully prepared lime mortar floors; the lime was probably produced from burnt shell. The floors date to between 3510 and 3150 cal BP, providing the earliest-known evidence for the use of lime mortar, and for durable settlement construction, in this region.

Archaeological nomenclature influences the classification of cultural phases, objects and related behavioural interpretations. The term ‘Madrasien’, synonymous with the Acheulian, was a key concept in early studies of Indian prehistory, encompassing notions of geographical/administrative boundaries, tool types, cultural identities and migrations. Madrasien was coined in 1931 by the Austrian prehistorian Oswald Menghin and established in South Asian prehistory by V.D. Krishnaswami. Here, the authors trace the evolution of the term, situating it within the wider discourses in Indian prehistory and examining its role in shaping ideas on South Asian Palaeolithic nomenclatures. The Madrasien was gradually replaced by the current medley of African, European and Southeast Asian terminologies.

Throughout the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, humans adapted to significant climate and environmental change. One key region for investigating these adaptive strategies is Island Southeast Asia, where fluctuating sea levels led to dramatic changes in coastlines, vegetation and fauna. The authors present new data from the re-excavation of Pilanduk Cave on Palawan Island, Philippines. The results corroborate the results of earlier excavations that identified Pleistocene occupation of the site. Pilanduk shows evidence for specialised deer hunting and freshwater mollusc consumption during the Last Glacial Maximum. The results add to the evidence for the shifting foraging behaviours of modern humans occupying variable tropical environments across Island Southeast Asia.

The most westerly Pacific island chain, running from Taiwan southwards through the Philippines, has long been central in debates about the origins and early migrations of Austronesian-speaking peoples from the Asian mainland into the islands of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Focusing on the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon in the Philippines, the authors combine new and published radiocarbon dates to underpin a revised culture-historical synthesis. The results speak to the initial contacts and long-term relationships between Indigenous hunter-gatherers and immigrant Neolithic farmers, and the question of how the early speakers of Malayo-Polynesian languages spread into and through the Philippines.

During the mid-first millennium AD, new kingdoms and states emerged across South Asia. At this time, land grants made to Hindu temples are thought to have led to wide-ranging societal transformations. To date, however, neither the land-grant charters nor the changes they are said to have driven have been studied archaeologically. Here, the authors present the results of the first archaeological investigation of the charters and their landscape context. Bringing together the textual record with a survey of 268 religious and residential sites, the results establish historical baselines against which the longue durée developments of South Asian social, political and economic formation can be profitably re-posed.

Morphological and compositional analysis of glass beads from three shipwrecks in the Indian Ocean world has increased our understanding of the chronology and distribution of mid-fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century glass.

Established chronologies indicate a long-term ‘Hoabinhian’ hunter-gatherer occupation of Mainland Southeast Asia during the Terminal Pleistocene to Mid-Holocene (45 000–3000 years ago). Here, the authors re-examine the ‘Hoabinhian’ sequence from north-west Thailand using new radiocarbon and luminescence data from Spirit Cave, Steep Cliff Cave and Banyan Valley Cave. The results indicate that hunter-gatherers exploited this ecologically diverse region throughout the Terminal Pleistocene and the Pleistocene–Holocene transition, and into the period during which agricultural lifeways emerged in the Holocene. Hunter-gatherers did not abandon this highland region of Thailand during periods of environmental and socioeconomic change.

The use of coffins and jars as funerary receptacles was common across Southeast Asia. During the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries AD, cremation was the dominant mortuary tradition on the Angkorian plains, but in the Cardamom Mountains to the south, contemporaneous groups practised a unique burial tradition involving the deposition of un-cremated bone in exposed ceramic vessels and log coffins. The authors present the first geochemical analysis of individuals from this highland culture, specifically the site of Phnom Pel. The childhood diets of those interred in jars and coffins may have been sourced from different areas within the Cardamom Mountains, suggesting that the individuals came from discrete groups.

The earliest claim for domesticated rice in Island Southeast Asia (4960–3565 cal BP) derives from a single grain embedded in a ceramic sherd from Gua Sireh Cave, Borneo. In a first assessment of spikelet-base assemblages within pottery sherds using quantitative microCT analysis, the authors found no additional rice remains within this sherd to support the early date of rice farming; analysis of a more recent Gua Sireh sherd (1990–830 cal BP), however, indicates that 70 per cent of spikelet bases are from domesticated rice. This technique offers a high degree of contextual and temporal resolution for approaching organic-tempered ceramics as well-preserved archaeobotanical assemblages.

Archaeological excavations at Kota Tampan in West Malaysia recovered a large stone assemblage dated to 70 kya and believed to be associated with the presence of early Anatomically Modern Humans in Mainland Southeast Asia. New technological analysis demonstrates that almost all these stone artefacts result from early stage reduction through freehand and bipolar percussion.

In prehistoric coastal and western-central Thailand, rice was the dominant cultivar. In eastern-central Thailand, however, the first known farmers cultivated millet. Using one of the largest collections of archaeobotanical material in Southeast Asia, this article examines how cropping systems were adapted as domesticates were introduced into eastern-central Thailand. The authors argue that millet reached the region first, to be progressively replaced by rice, possibly due to climatic pressures. But despite the increasing importance of rice, dryland, rain-fed cultivation persisted throughout ancient central Thailand, a result that contributes to refining understanding of the development of farming in Southeast Asia.

Inscriptional evidence suggests that the Phnom Kulen plateau to the north-east of Angkor in Cambodia was the location of Mahendraparvata—an early Angkorian capital city and one of the first capitals of the Khmer Empire (ninth to fifteenth centuries AD). To date, however, archaeological evidence has been limited to a scatter of small and apparently isolated shrines. Here, the authors combine airborne laser scanning with ground-based survey to define an extended urban network dating from the ninth century AD, which they identify as Mahendraparvata. This research yields new and important insights into the emergence of Angkorian urban areas.