• DOI:10.1086/201711
• Corpus ID: 145732661

An Evolutionary Approach to the Southeast Asian Cultural Sequence [and Comments and Reply]

@article{Hutterer1976AnEA,
  title={An Evolutionary Approach to the Southeast Asian Cultural Sequence [and Comments and Reply]},
  author={Karl L. Hutterer and Jim Allen and S. Arutiunov and Donn Bayard and D. K. Bhattacharya and Bennet Bronson and Mikhail Chlenov and Robin Donkin and Roy Ellen and David R. Harris and Brian Hayden and Charles Higham and Maxine R. Kleindienst and Jonathan H. Kress and Lech Krzyżaniak and David Richard Moore and Richard J. Pearson and Jean Treloggen and Warren Peterson and Janice Stargardt and Robert Orr Whyte},
  journal={Current Anthropology},
  year={1976},
  volume={17},
  pages={221 - 242}
}

• K. L. Hutterer, Jim Allen, +18 authors R. Whyte
• Published 1 June 1976
• Geography
• Current Anthropology

Recent archaelogical work has directed attention toward Southeast Asia. However, while the substantive results of this research are significant for tracing worldwide prehistoric developments, the integration of these findings into a regional archaeological framework continues to be a problem. Most traditional chronological-developmental frameworks of Southeast Asian prehistory were patterned after the European paradigm of five prehistoric ages. It was implied that cultural developments occurred in several major stages and were relatively uniform throughout the region. The results of several recent excavations as well as ethnographic evidence contradict these assumptions. It is argued here that an explanation for these contradictions can be found in the ecology of Southeast Asia. Much of the region falls within the zone of the perhumid tropics. Resource distribution and a number of other ecological conditions of that zone are responsible for a high degree of geographical discontinuity of the human ecology and an ever increasing cultural diversity over time.