Contextualizing an Archaeology of Asia

This volume offers an archaeology of Asia whose geographic coverage ranges from the equator to the upper latitudes, and from the South China Sea to the lakes of eastern Kazakhstan. For many readers picking up this book, their first question is likely, " Why Asia? " The answer is fourfold: Asia is vast; it is diverse; its history merits comparison with other regions of the world; and for the last century Western archaeologists have largely ignored Asia's archaeology. The primary goal of this volume is to bring to the fore Asia's past as part of world archaeology by including case studies on subjects of global archaeological interest. Asia is vast in geographic, demographic, economic, and political terms. Physically , Asia constitutes the world's largest landmass, contains a large percentage of the world's population, and all of the world's institutionalized religions. Three of the world's four most populous countries today (China, India, Indonesia) are found in Asia. Countries across the region are becoming the world's economic and political superpowers, and these developments represent the endpoints of millennia-long histories. The region's geographic size is so large, and the internal divisions (particularly between South, East, and Southeast Asia) so pronounced that a single volume can only hope to capture a sense of its history. The Asian land mass also encompasses extraordinarily high social, ethnolin-guistic, and ecological variability. Ecologically, the region stretches from the arctic to the equatorial. Its multiple social histories intersect and overlap, and ethnolin-guistic groups span large areas. Studying ancient Asia requires the use of multiscalar approaches that transcend both neoevolutionary frameworks that archaeologists so commonly embrace, and also modern nation – state boundaries that blur the borders of ancient polities and interactional networks. Even today, Asia's industrial centers and high-tech cities exist alongside lowland peasant farmers and upland swidden cultivators. These farming communities continue to trade with small-scale forest foragers across parts of India, and nomadic pastoralists in western China. Coastal strandlopers across Southeast Asia barter with settled villagers, and