The Dvaravati Gap - Linking Prehistory and History in Early Thailand

Abstract

The author’s principal research has mainly been in the field of Southeast Asian prehistoric archaeology rather than art history but one topic that has preoccupied me since I first excavated between 1980–1985 at the site of Ban Don Ta Phet in west-central Thailand is the relationships between the late prehistoric Iron Age cultures of Southeast Asia and the Indian influenced Buddhist and Hindu civilizations of the early first millennium of the present era and especially the Dvaravati Civilization of Central Thailand which occupied the same region as the late prehistoric Iron Age communities– albeit after an interval of several hundred years.