Coastal Connectivity: Long-Term Trading Networks Across the South China Sea

ABSTRACT Long-distance coastal interactions have shaped much of world history, most evident in social and economic ties through sea-lanes and trade-routes that connect to other regions and potentially throughout the world. In this way, separate coastal communities on distant shores of the same sea, lake, river, or ocean can share more in common with each other than with their adjacent inland neighbors. The South China Sea presents one case in point, where cultural practices and histories have been shared across remotely separated areas but not necessarily among nearest-neighbor communities. The South China Sea has been one of the world's busiest zones of cross-regional commerce, at least since the Iron Age if not much earlier. During the operation of the so-called Sa Huynh-Kalanay Interaction Sphere, about 500 BC through AD 100, sites in both Mainland and Island Southeast Asia shared distinctive styles of pottery, precious-stone and baked-clay jewelry, and other tangible markers of a sea-crossing trading ...