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Mainland Southeast Asia’s Earliest Kingdoms and the Case of “Funan”

Archaeological research across mainland Southeast Asia on the transition to history has fundamentally altered scholarly reconstructions of the region’s first millennium AD states. One of these, Funan, has been the subject of historical and archaeological analysis for more than a century. This chapter reviews colonial scholarship on Funan and on the Mekong Delta, and contextualizes postcolonial archaeology within a regional and temporal framework of increasing connectivities (both coastal and riverine). Archaeological research on the period from circa 500 BC to AD 500 offers new perspectives on the origins, structure, and demise of Funan as an historical polity and as one of Southeast Asia’s best documented early states. Funan as a complex polity and its new urban forms emerged before “Indianization”; the new state was neither strictly maritime-oriented nor externally created: its inhabitants also practiced deep-seated traditions that looked inland and along the Mekong and its tributaries, and the agricultural development of the delta was clearly a major (possibly short-lived) achievement.