A Look at " L ' Art Prebouddhique de la Chine et de l ' Asie du Sud -

FOREWORD SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Karl Narr asked me to write an article summarizing the recently discovered data of Southeast Asian prehistory for publication in German in Saeculum. In the fall of 1977, I finally did this in the context of an examination of a number of Heine-Ge1dern's hypotheses on Southeast Asian prehistory. I titled the paper "New data on late Southeast Asian prehistory and their interpretation," with a subtitle that is the title of this paper (Solheim 1980a). As I suspected that relatively few of the specialists on Southeast Asian prehistory would read the original article in German, I requested permission to reprint portions of the article in English and this was very kindly granted, for which I express my thanks. For present purposes I have deleted the data portion of the original paper as not relevant to an issue of AP concerned primarily with the countries in Southeast Asia where Edmond Saurin worked. I have made a few further revisions and added a few minor points in the second half of the paper, but the major conclusions of this paper are much as they were in the original, except for my hypotheses added here on the Cham traders in western Indonesia and on to India and Madagascar. Different portions of the original paper, primarily those parts concerned with South China, have been reprinted in the Journal of the Hong Kong Archaeological Society (Solheim 1979).