Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the methods available to reconstruct the history of plants and animals in the SE Asian region, apart from archaeobotany and archaeozoology. It focuses on primary data in the fields of iconography and comparative lexicography.

Paper long abstract:

The study of the early history of plants and animals in Southeast Asia has focused on archaeobotany and has thus been dominated by salient macro-remains, particularly rice. However, ethnographic studies of plant production show farmers growing and exploiting a wide range of crops, including vegetative crops such as bananas and taro, and tree-crops, particularly fruits and oil-plants. The paper explores what techniques are to hand to reconstruct the history of these plants and the subsistence matrices in which they are embedded. It suggests that the major sources of information are;

a) Synchronic ethnography; detailed description of present agricultural systems

b) Historic data; written, archival and epigraphic sources

c) Iconography; representations of plants and animals in manuscripts, paintings and friezes

d) Lexicography; the compilation and analysis of vernacular names

e) Genetics; the analysis of DNA and consequent hypotheses about phylogenetic relationships

f) Phenotypic description; botanical description of the characters of plants and cultigens, zoological characters of livestock

These areas remain significantly under-researched and under-exploited in comparison to archaeobotany, which is itself not well known for the SE Asian region.

The paper will focus on two areas, iconography and lexicography, where the author has compiled significant amounts of primary data and show how these can contribute to our understanding of plant histories. A comparison is made with the Pacific where this type of approach is much better developed, based on lexical analysis, ethnography and the analysis of starches and phytoliths.