Chapter 4 the Hoabinhian of Southeast Asia and Its Relationship
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Chapter 4 The Hoabinhian of Southeast Asia and its Relationship to Regional Pleistocene Lithic Technologies Ben Marwick This chapter has been peer-reviewed and published in: Robinson, Erick, Sellet, Frederic (Eds.) 2018. Lithic Technological Organization and Paleoenvironmental Change Global and Diachronic Perspectives. Springer International Publishing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-64407-3 Abstract The Hoabinhian is a distinctive Pleistocene stone artefact technology of mainland and island Southeast Asia. Its relationships to key patterns of technological change both at a global scale and in adjacent regions such as East Asia, South Asia and Australia are currently poorly understood. These key patterns are important indicators of evolutionary and demographic change in human prehistory so our understanding of the Hoabinhian may be substantially enhanced by examining these relationships. In this paper I present new evidence of ancient Hoabinhian technology from Northwest Thailand and examine connections between Hoabinhian technology and the innovation of other important Pleistocene technological processes such as radial core geometry. I present some claims about the evolutionary significance of the Hoabinhian and recommend future research priorities. Introduction The Hoabinhian represents a certain way of making stone artifacts, especially sumatraliths, during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene in island and mainland Southeast Asia. Although it has been a widely accepted and used concept in the region for several decades, its relationships to key patterns of technological and paleoenvironmental change both at a global scale and in adjacent regions such as East Asia, South Asia and Australia are currently poorly understood. What makes these relationships especially intriguing is that the geographical locations of Hoabinhian assemblages are at strategic points on the arc of dispersal from Africa to Australia. This highlights the potential of Southeast Asia as a key source of data on the range and diversity of technological behaviors of the colonizers of the southern arc. The archaeology of the regions neighboring the Hoabinhian area has relevance for assessing its industrial affiliations. In this paper I examine select Pleistocene stone artifact assemblages from South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia to investigate patterns of change in stone artifact technology and paleoenvironments. I place the findings within broader debates over the development of the Southeast Asian Paleolithic (Fig. 4.1). Fig. 4.1 Map of key locations discussed in the text. 1: Jurreru Valley; 2: Donggutuo; 3: Zhoukoudian; 4: Kara Bom; 5: Shuidonggou; 6: Tsagaan Agui; 7: Lang Rongrien; 8: Tham Lod; 9: Tham Khoung & Xom Trai; 10: Jerimalai; 11: Liang Bua & Mata Menge. Understanding the Hoabinhian can be challenging due to the use of diverse and abstract concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘industry’, ‘tradition’ and ‘techno-complex’ (Moser, 2001). However, if we consider specifically how the stone artifacts that characterize Hoabinhian sites have been described, we see a clear and consistent theme that unites Hoabinhian sites throughout Southeast Asia. This begins with one of the earliest definitions of the Hoabinhian, drafted in 1932 at the First Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East. At that meeting, French archaeologists working in northern Vietnam proposed that the Hoabinhian “is characterized by tools often worked only on one face, by hammerstones, by implements of sub-triangular section, by discs, short axes and almond shaped artifacts” (Matthews, 1966). Forty years later, the lithic elements of the Hoabhinhian were similarly defined by Gorman (1972), based on his work on northwest Thailand: “A generally unifacial flaked tool tradition made primarily on water rounded pebbles and large flakes detached from these pebbles, core tools (‘sumatraliths’) made by complete flaking on one side of a pebble and grinding stones also made on rounded pebbles”. Recent literature continues this theme, with Chitkament et al. (2015) noting that sumatraliths are the “the signature of the Hoabinhian technical traditions” and Ji et al. (2016) similarly summarizing as follows: “the larger Hoabinhian tools are consistently shaped on cobbles and are distinguished by a consistent plano-convex cross-section. The common theme for formal tools centers around the unifacial flaking of water- rounded cobbles, with flaking usually around the circumference of a unifacial tool, which has been called the “sumatralith”” (Fig. 4.2). Fig. 4.2 Illustration of a sumatralith, modified from Jeremie and Vacher (1992). Although the chronological and geographical ranges of this technology continue to be contested (Moser, 2001, 2012), there appears to be a consensus among current usage of the term ‘Hoabinhian’ that the sumatralith, and closely related artifact forms, are the central defining attributes of Hoabinhian assemblages. In the following sections I briefly summarize the late Pleistocene stone artifact technologies of a selection of regions surrounding the core Hoabinhian area of mainland Southeast Asia. I conclude with a discussion that hypothesizes some potential relationships between the Hoabinhian and surrounding technologies. South Asia A richly detailed record of the South Asian Paleolithic comes from several open sites and one rockshelter in the Jurreru Valley in the Kurnool district of southern India. Much of the work in this area has focused on understanding the impact of the Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT) event at 73.8 Ka on human populations (Petraglia et al., 2007; Storey et al., 2012). The two pre-YTT assemblages (n= 1889) have clear Middle Stone Age affinities with Levallois products (~1%,), scrapers (~8%), notches (~2%), blades (~1%) and discoidal cores (~0.5%) (Clarkson et al., 2012). There are very few differences between the pre- and post-YTT assemblages. Raw materials are dominated by limestone before and after the YTT event, with a gradual increase in chert and chalcedony much later (Clarkson et al., 2012). Most of these differences occur amongst flakes, flaked pieces, notches, side scrapers and multiplatform cores and are in the order of a 1% change. The post-YTT decline in flakes and increase in flaked pieces, which are numerically dominant in both periods, is probably more indicative of fragmentation than a behavioral shift. The other changes represent a gradually increasing emphasis on single and multiplatform cores and a trend toward higher levels of retouch intensity (Clarkson et al., 2012). The taxonomic affiliation of the makers of these assemblages is uncertain (Appenzeller, 2012; Mellars et al., 2013) but the Middle Stone Age affinities suggest a H. sapiens population before and after the YTT event (Petraglia et al., 2007). These technological continuities suggest that the YTT event did not have the drastic population differentiation effects that Ambrose (1998) claims would follow from drastically diminished human population sizes. In contrast to this gradual change, a period of substantial ecological, technological and demographic transition at 35 Ka has been documented in this region. At this time there was a large increase in production rates of microblades coincident with an increasingly fragmented and variable environment and indications of newly separated human populations in India (Petraglia et al., 2009b). The microliths are initially elongate asymmetric backed point forms (i.e. trapezes and triangles) followed by greater proportions of symmetric forms (i.e., lunates) and in the later part of the sequence, artifacts backed along both margins (thought to be drills) Clarkson et al. (2012); (Clarkson et al., 2009). One influential explanation of this dominance of microliths was that they indicated an eastward dispersal of modern humans from Africa (Mellars, 2006). However, anatomically modern humans appear in South Asia before the proliferation of microliths (Perera et al., 2011) and the continuities of the Middle Paleolithic assemblages into the later Pleistocene do not support the idea of population replacement. Instead, Clarkson et al. (2009) propose that the more variable climate motivated people to produce more microliths to support an increased reliance on barbed projectiles as a highly reliable and maintainable hunting technology. East Asia In shifting our attention to East Asia, we note that the vocabulary and methods of stone artifact analysis also shifts, adding an element of complexity in making regional comparisons. As in South Asia, there is no clear division between the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. At Donggutuo, dated to about 1 My in the Nihewan Basin of northern China, Schick et al. (1991) describe an assemblage dominated by unmodified flakes and flake fragments (62%) and small numbers of retouched pieces (side-scrapers, end-scrapers, notches, points, end scrapers, awls, and burins, ~1%) and cores (5%). The raw material is mostly variable quality chert/fine- grained quartzite (96%) with smaller amounts of limestone and volcanic rocks. They characterize the assemblage as simple, casual and minimally modified. Hou (2003) has also noted that the assemblage contains side-scrapers, end-scrapers, notches, points, awls, and burins and a type of radial discoid core with small elongate flake scars that is similar to the microlithic wedge-shaped cores of northern China during the Upper Paleolithic (Wang et al., 2005). Levallois products have been noted at a few locations, such as Zhoukoudian and Kara Bom in the north (Boëda et al., 2013; Brantingham et