Op-Ed from University f Huston
Political History of Vietnam and Cambodia
* The following was a presentation given on November 8, 2008 for the World Affairs Council of Houston’s Global Issues in Depth – Portrait of Southeast Asia.
Immigration is as old as Southeast Asia’s history
- Human movements and colonizations across land and sea in Southeast Asia
- The early Homo populations settled in Southeast Asia and extended northwards and eastwards to China and Java by perhaps 1.5 million years ago.
- The movement of the anatomically modern humans that crossed the sea gaps of eastern Indonesia to reach Australia, New Guina and possibly the Philippines around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago.
- The Americans were reached more recently, perhaps about 14,000 years ago.
Source: A Cultural History of Southeast Asia: From Earliest Times to the Indic Civilizations,edited by P. Bellwood and I. Glover. Routledge Curzon Press, New York (2004).
Southeast Asia from prehistory to history
- Southeast Asia civilization was not a backwater stuck fast in the stone age
- Southeast Asia civilization is not a loan civilization of India or China
- But Southeast Asia is an imagined reality: Is Southeast Asia a jigsaw puzzle or a collage?
- “Glocalization” in Southeast Asia
Source: A Cultural History of Southeast Asia: From Earliest Times to the Indic Civilizations, edited by P. Bellwood and I. Glover. Routledge Curzon Press, New York (2004).