Ever since the redoubtable Madeleine Colani explored the wonderful karst country of Hoa Binh Province, west of Hanoi in northern Vietnam, a century ago, the hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia have received rather a poor press. With a background in the superb stone technology of the Upper Palaeolithic of her native France, Madeleine Colani found the corresponding finds in the caves of Hoa Binh underwhelming. She and her sister explored and excavated many rock shelters, finding that a stone tool called a sumatralith dominated the assemblages. This is a large river cobble flaked on one side only, with a pointed end, probably used for multiple applications. Contrast that with a Solutrean laurel-leaf point and the gulf in technique is wide. The assemblages she documented in her seminal publications described these sites as Hoabinhian, after the name of the province where she worked.
Since then, similar sites have been identified over much of the limestone uplands of Southeast Asia. In 1970, I joined Chester Gorman at the remote site of Banyan Valley Cave, in Northeast Thailand, to spend a season excavating there. We found sumatraliths, many stone flakes, the fragmented bones of forest animals, and numerous hearths. This was one of several rock shelters he excavated, the best known being Spirit Cave. Since then, Rasmi Shoocondej has examined yet more, extending their chronology back 40,000 years at the site of Tham Lod. The habitat back then was a mixture of forest and grassland. The presence of wild cattle, water buffalo, and deer evidence a relatively open terrain rather than a canopied rainforest. With the onset of a warmer climate about 12,000 years ago, the forest began to spread and arboreal animals replaced those better adapted to the grasslands of late glacial chill.
Hunter-gatherers survive in the deep forests on the Thai-Malaysian border to this day. During the rainy season, they use rock shelters, but with the dry season they move through the forest, making temporary huts of stakes and banana leaves. The former are easy to find, and cultural remains survive well, but the latter are ephemeral and soon lose visibility. The result of this is that for decades since Madeleine Colani set the ball rolling, the hunter-gatherers of Southeast Asia have been portrayed as small-scale, mobile, and really rather tedious. Only with the arrival of the first farmers from the north did the pace of change quicken and the cultural sequence become much more interesting.
