Karl L. Hutterer

Hunter-Gatherers and Their Neighbors from Prehistory to the Present [and Comments and Replies]

It is widely assumed that modem hunter-gatherer societies lived until very recently in isolation from food-producing societies and states and practiced neither cultivation, pastoralism, nor trade. This paper brings together data suggesting a very different model of middle to late Holocene hunter-gatherer economy. It is argued that such foraging roups were heavily dependent upon both trade with food-producing populations and part-time cultivation or pastoralism. Recent publications on a number of huntergatherer societies establish that the symbiosis and desultory food production observed among them today are neither recent nor anomalous but represent an economy practiced by most huntergatherers for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Psychological and political reasons for Westerners attachment o the myth of the Savage Other are discussed.

Observations on the Lower Palaeolithic of Northeast Asia [and Comments and Reply]

The chopper-chopping-tool tradition proposed by Movius in 1948 as a characterization of Lower Palaeolithic assemblage variability in East Asia is here examined and rejected. It is argued that its uncritical acceptance in the Western literature has resulted in an inaccurate perception of technological variability and change in this vast region. A brief summary of recent primary source material clearly indicates (1) that there are variable quantities of classic Acheulian bifacial handaxes in some Korean, Chinese, and Mongolian Lower Palaeolithic assemblages and (2) that a dichotomous pattern of assemblage variability characterized by handaxes in the West and choppers/chopping tools in the East in an unrealistic and oversimplified schematization of the East Asian Palaeolithic, which rivals in its complexity contemporaneous assemblages in the West. A better approximation of the Northeast Asian Lower Palaeolithic is Jia and Weis two-series hypothesis, based upon recent excavations at Zhoukoudian Locality 1, Shiyu, Dingcun, and Kehe. A major shortcoming is insufficient emphasis on the shared features of the two series. It is suggested that more refined lithic typologies incorporating attributes of manufacture and use and quantitative assessments of overall assemblage composition will be required for better approximations of modal assemblage types in this region.

Early Southeast Asia: Old Wine in New Skins? - A Review Article

late by grafting onto it shoots of the more vigorous-and already mature- civilizations of India and China, as exemplified in such names as Further India, East Indies, Indochina, and Cochinchina. And it was assumed that the essence of these classical oriental civilizations was well enough understood to enable us to judge their formative role in molding Southeast Asian societies and cultures. The important problem for discussion and research, it was felt, was not so much the apparent fact that Southeast Asian civilizations were derived from abroad, but the degree to which local cultural and social forms had been replaced by foreign elements, and exactly when and under what circumstances this occurred. Today, the situation has changed radically. The old generation of Southeast Asianists, most of whom were trained as Indologists and Sinologists and who served, in one way or another, the European colonial regimes, is largely gone. Among a younger group of scholars, less encumbered by the specific backgrounds and conditions under which the pioneers had to labor, there has not only been some loss of confidence in our knowledge of the roots and essence of Indian and Chinese cultures, but there has also been forming a conviction that the Southeast Asian region has always had, and still retains, a profound cultural identity of its own. In particular, a consensus has been growing that sees the origin and growth of early Southeast Asian civilizations resulting, not from a break with indigenous cultural and social traditions, but rather as their natural outgrowth. From this perspective, the elements of Indian and Chinese religious and political systems that can be found in Southeast Asia and that have hitherto loomed so large in our perception of the regions culture and history are not viewed as impositions from the outside. Rather, they are seen as more or less deliberate imports by Southeast Asians who, in the process of state formation, modified and reshaped these elements according to their own needs and interests.