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

Long-distance coastal interactions have shaped much of world history, most evident in social and economic ties through sea-lanes and traderoutes 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 sharemore in commonwith 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 SouthChina 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 500BCthroughAD100, sites inboth 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 network. Upon closer examination, the evidence from Vietnam and the Philippines suggests origins of cross-regional exchange at least as early as 1500 BC. Over time, different items were mobilized into systems that emphasized the same long-distance contact nodes in shifting configurations, creating complicated and evolving networks. Here we consider how trading partnerships were formed and maintained over successive generations and centuries, made possible by social and economic networking across the South China Sea.