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Thailand EARLY HISTORY
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Figure 2. Southeast Asian Region.
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Figure 3. Centers of Power in Southeast Asia, Second to
Thirteenth Centuries.
Over the course of millennia, migrations from southern China
peopled Southeast Asia, including the area of contemporary
Thailand
(see
fig. 2). Archaeological evidence indicates a
thriving Paleolithic culture in the region and continuous human
habitation for at least 20,000 years.
The pace of economic and social development was uneven and
conditioned by climate and geography. The dense forests of the
Chao Phraya Valley in the central part of Thailand and the Malay
Peninsula in the south produced such an abundance of food that
for a long time there was no need to move beyond a hunting-and-
gathering economy. In contrast, rice cultivation appeared early
in the highlands of the far north and hastened the development of
a more communal social and political organization.
Excavations at Ban Chiang, a small village on the Khorat
Plateau in northeastern Thailand, have revealed evidence of
prehistoric inhabitants who may have forged bronze implements as
early as 3000 B.C. and cultivated rice around the fourth
millennium B.C. If so, the Khorat Plateau would be the oldest
rice-producing area in Asia because the inhabitants of China at
that time still consumed millet. Archaeologists have assembled
evidence that the bronze implements found at the Thai sites were
forged in the area and not transported from elsewhere. They
supported this claim by pointing out that both copper and tin
deposits (components of bronze) are found in close proximity to
the Ban Chiang sites. If these claims are correct, Thai bronze
forgers would have predated the "Bronze Age," which
archaeologists had traditionally believed began in the Middle
East around 2800 B.C. and in China about a thousand years later.
Before the end of the first millennium B.C., tribal
territories had begun to coalesce into protohistorical kingdoms
whose names survive in Chinese dynastic annals of the period.
Funan, a state of substantial proportions, emerged in the second
century B.C. as the earliest and most significant power in
Southeast Asia
(see
fig. 3). Its Hindu ruling class controlled
all of present-day Cambodia and extended its power to the center
of modern Thailand. The Funan economy was based on maritime trade
and a well-developed agricultural system; Funan maintained close
commercial contact with India and served as a base for the
Brahman merchant-missionaries who brought Hindu culture to
Southeast Asia.
On the narrow isthmus to the southwest of Funan, Malay citystates controlled the portage routes that were traversed by
traders and travelers journeying between India and Indochina. By
the tenth century A.D. the strongest of them, Tambralinga
(present-day Nakhon Si Thammarat), had gained control of all
routes across the isthmus. Along with other city-states on the
Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, it had become part of the Srivijaya
Empire, a maritime confederation that between the seventh and
thirteenth centuries dominated trade on the South China Sea and
exacted tolls from all traffic through the Strait of Malacca.
Tambralinga adopted Buddhism, but farther south many of the Malay
city-states converted to Islam, and by the fifteenth century an
enduring religious boundary had been established on the isthmus
between Buddhist mainland Southeast Asia and Muslim Malaya.
Although the Thai conquered the states of the isthmus in the
thirteenth century and continued to control them in the modern
period, the Malay of the peninsula were never culturally absorbed
into the mainstream of Thai society. The differences in religion,
language, and ethnic origin caused strains in social and
political relations between the central government and the
southern provinces into the late twentieth century
(see Ethnicity, Regionalism, and Language
, ch. 2).
Data as of September 1987
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