The appearance, nature and, in particular, the relative chronology of early human experimentation with and mastery of metallurgy has been a topic that has much occupied the minds of many of our archaeological forebears. This academic interest has long been derived from the well-established contemporaneity, and the strong potential for causality, between metal use and production and rapidly increasing social complexity at the turn of the Neolithic/Chalcolithic/Bronze Age, in the Near Eastern cultural contexts in which the phenomenon was first remarked upon around a century ago, notably by V. Gordon Childe.

The intervening decades have seen this potential association, between early metallurgy and developing social elite groups and behaviours, examined in many regions around the world, and Southeast Asia has been no exception. Being one of mankind’s most technically complex technologies (depending on geological affordances as well as human skillsets), metallurgy has also been a type-marker for identifying potential interactions of varying intensities between populations spanning great expanses of space and time. Some of these interaction spheres, especially that of the late 3rd millennium BC Seima-Turbino phenomenon, as advocated by E.N. Chernykh, extend from the Gulf of Finland to the Altaï mountains and beyond into China, in the course of just a few centuries. This remarkable and widely-accepted model for the transmission of a well-developed configuration of metallurgical behaviours, has attracted special attention in Southeast Asia, which, positioned at the eastern terminus of the Eurasian continent and the boundary with the Pacific Ocean, could theoretically represent an end point of 8000+ kilometers of terrestrial socio-technical networks.

Testing this idea, and those that preceded it in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), namely the publication of very early, 4th millennium BC, dates for regional copper metallurgy is an important exercise. Not only is there the question of Southeast Asia’s role with respect to Eurasia generally, there is the much more focussed issue of Sino-Southeast Asian interactions in late prehistory. Testing these ideas must start with data, and those of the highest quality possible. My involvement in this endeavour extends over fifteen years, but is built upon a half century of scholarship by a host of senior colleagues, among whom some are indisputably pre-eminent. My contribution, for which I am greatly honoured to have been so acknowledged by the Shanghai Archaeology Forum, has been in two parts, those of archaeometallurgy and Myanmar prehistory. There has been a great deal of fortuitous happenstance thus far in my career, and it is the confluence of these research streams that has enabled my role in research in early Southeast Asian metallurgy and on the nature of exchanges with contemporary China and India. As to my role at this juncture, I humbly submit that I have been a producer and provider of data with which to test the hypotheses of my seniors (in alphabetical order: Roberto Ciarla, Charles Higham, Vincent Pigott and Joyce White), to expose potential subtle modifiers and to emphasise their great foresight.

Establishing the chronology of early Southeast Asian metallurgy has obviously relied upon the provision of reliable radiometric dating. After shaky beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, this now considerable database, which is still largely confined to northeast and central Thailand, does not share the critical land boundary with present-day China with which we can directly test technological transmission models. North Vietnamese Bronze Age chronologies remain unclear and it is not yet apparent whether northern Laos even has a Bronze Age (though I emphasise that this is my personal opinion). Nevertheless, the last ten, and even five years, have seen enormous strides in firmly establishing the Mainland (Thai) Neolithic to Bronze Age transition in the later centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. The primary impact of absolute dating has been to disassociate regional copper production and consumption from the Seima-Turbino phenomenon; there are simply too many centuries between that cultural horizon and the first metal-bearing Thai contexts.

My, as yet limited, contribution to the mass of chronological data has been to incorporate new archaeological information from north-central Myanmar, where I have had the honour to direct the Mission Archéologique Française au Myanmar since late 2012. This collaboration between the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Department of Archaeology and National Museum (DANM) of the Myanmar Ministry for Religious Affairs and Culture (MoRAC), has succeeded in providing a baseline Neolithic to Bronze Age horizon at the critical settlement and funerary complex at Oakaie/Nyaung’gan, near the banks of the lower Chindwin River. This Myanmar chronology, based on a nationally unprecedented 52 AMS 14C dates, shows a transmission in or around the 10th c. BC. This can be considered highly consistent with what we know from northeast and central Thailand, as well as that in the geographically much closer metal-bearing contexts of Yunnan. The Myanmar-French team has now been digging at the UNESCO listed “Pyu” historic city site of Halin since 2017. We are mainly tackling the extensive prehistoric strata but we seem to have a potential chronological window spanning the mid-3rd millennium BC to the early 2nd millennium AD. Our multi-national team, who will be digging an Iron Age (late 1st millennium BC) cemetery as I make my presentation in Shanghai, are currently awaiting another 40 radiocarbon dates, in addition to the circa 30 we already have for Halin. A radiometrically-founded culture-history for north-central Myanmar is being built, one testpit/date/analysis at a time, and as the most northerly excavation in Mainland Southeast Asia, our results concern Yunnan and NE India as much as they do the main core of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. I take this opportunity to give my sincere thanks to His Excellency Thura U Aung Ko, Minister for MoRAC, U Kyaw Oo Lwin, Director-General for the DANM, and to His Excellency M. Christian Lechervy, French Ambassador to the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, for their combined and unstinting support.

The second element of my contribution to research in early Southeast Asian metallurgy as a technical specialist in regional archaeometallurgy. Under the supervision of Prof. Vincent C. Pigott, Prof. Marcos Martinón-Torres and Prof. Thilo Rehren at University College London, I conducted my doctoral study of the central Thai “Khao Wong Prachan Valley” copper production assemblage of the Thailand Archaeometallurgy Project (“TAP”), co-directed by Prof. Pigott of the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Ajarn (‘teacher’) Surapol Natapintu, then of the Thai Fine Arts Department and subsequently of the Faculty of Archaeology of Silpakorn University, Bangkok. For my work I employed the well-established theoretical and laboratory approaches of the ‘UCL metallurgy school’, and, I argue demonstrated a striking difference between the technical skill apparent in secondary production (foundry) activities and an evident experimental phase to primary production (smelting) behaviours. Ergo, the early central Thai metallurgists possessed but a partial knowledge of metal production technologies, which is contrary to the late 3rd millennium BC Seima-Turbino metallurgical tradition having reached Thailand – although, I repeat, Prof. Mei Jianjun’s model that this is the original transmission pathway for metallurgy to have reached Xinjiang Province of western China and thence to the Central Plains is widely accepted. It is just that there is a gap of several thousand kilometres and some 6-8 centuries between the first metals in China and Mainland Southeast Asia, and that is without mentioning their profoundly different social configurations and technical competence.

My post-doctoral research followed the next logical step; could we reconstruct Southeast Asian non-precious/non-ferrous metal exchange patterns, moving from the mines and smelting sites, to alloying and recycling and consumption behaviours? This was essential in a region that lacked, and still lacks, widely agreed-upon ceramic sequences for regional comparisons. The archaeometallurgical methodology using Lead Isotope Analysis combined with elemental, metallographic and typological research, was not in any way ground breaking – indeed, the great strength of this approach is how robustly it has been tested around the world over the last 60 years. Neither was I the first to employ such techniques in Southeast Asia, to whom the honour goes to Dr Tom Chase, working with TAP in the 1980s, and to Prof. Yoshimitsu Hirao, working with Japanese-led excavations in the 1990s. The main difference with my research programme, the “Southeast Asian Lead Isotope Project” (SEALIP) is that I was an archaeometallurgist dedicated exclusively to regional metallurgy, working outwards from the production to the consumption sites and sampling widely from many typologies, sites and periods to gain a broad picture of the interaction sphere thus represented.

Given the lack of or difficult access to geological data in Southeast Asia, SEALIP began by establishing lead isotope variability existing between the three known prehistoric copper production sites. Without being able to differentiate copper from these loci and their producer populations, there would be no point continuing with the project. Luckily, we have excellent lead isotope distinction, and also the luck to work at a time when local authorities were once again much more receptive to micro-destructive sampling techniques. I cannot possibly list here all the kind colleagues, site directors, museum curators, cultural authorities, laboratory technicians and funding bodies who have helped progress SEALIP research to the stage we are at now, but suffice to say the total sampling is now ca. 1000 artefacts (metals and production materials) from dozens of late prehistoric and early historic sites in: Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, China, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar. It has been an enormous team effort, and it is beginning to bear fruit.

I say ‘beginning’ as we are dealing with vast areas that are only scantily explored archaeologically, and even less so from a metals perspective. Equivalent geographic spaces, like Europe and the Near East combined, have several tens of thousands of analyses, against our circa 1000+. Southeast Asia, and neighbouring regions, are also geologically highly complex, meaning there are without doubt many unknown production sites, and the populations they represent, remaining to be found in the upland zones of Southeast Asian and Southern China, named “Zomia” by Willem van Schendel and popularised by James C. Scott. The China/MSEA border extends over 2500 km, of which circa 1600 km lie between Myanmar and Yunnan. There is, surely, a huge amount of collaborative work to be done and I am hugely optimistic about the research networks currently building and already existing both intra and inter-regionally. This is truly a wonderful place to work and the pioneer sensation is alive and well, for me at least.

In the meantime, so as not to ‘take the wind out of the sails’ of my presentation, SEALIP, and its French Agence National de la Recherche-funded successor, “Bronze and Glass as Cultural Catalysts and Tracers in Early Southeast Asia” (BROGLASEA, with Dr Laure Dussubieux responsible for the glass aspect) have established archaeometrically reliable links between all of areas of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, over a period spanning over two millennia. In many instances, these exchange networks were unexpected or even counter-intuitive. They have also helped lock together a regional chronology where great disparities exist between the dating quality of different sites. Put simply, after 15 years of personal efforts and decades by colleagues, I really think we’re beginning to get at the truth of the matter of early Southeast Asian metallurgy and its local, regional and long-distance impact for socio-cultural developments.

Biographic Sketch
Oliver Pryce undertook his BSc Archaeology at University College London 1998-2001 and his MSc Archaeomaterials at Sheffield University 2003-2004. Pryce’s PhD in Southeast Asian archaeometallurgy at University College London 2005-2008, under the direction of Prof. Vincent C. Pigott and Prof. Marcos Martinón-Torres, led to a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the Research Laboratory for Art History and Archaeology, University of Oxford 2009-2012, during which time he was elected an Extraordinary Member of St Hugh’s College. Oliver Pryce spent nine months based in Vientiane, Laos, as a Senior Post-Doctoral Fellow for the French Institute de Recherche pour le Développement before being recruited as a tenured Researcher 2nd class in October 2013. He was promoted to 1st class Researcher in October 2017. Pryce has been director of the Southeast Asian Lead Isotope Project since 2009 and the French Archaeological Mission in Myanmar since October 2012. Pryce is currently Director of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche-funded project, Bronze and Glass as Cultural Catalysts and Tracers in Early Southeast Asia – BROGLASEA 2016-2020. Pryce has tutored ten students to the successful completion of the their Masters and has four current and one completed (now a lecturer) PhD students, from European and Asian countries.

Pryce has coordinated his archaeometallurgical research with dozens of colleagues from and excavating sites in: Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. In addition to the archaeological science laboratories used during his training at UCL and Sheffield, and as a postdoc in Oxford, Pryce has worked closely with Prof. Pernicka of the Curt-Engelhorn-Centre for Archaeometry in Mannheim, Germany ; Prof. Philippe Dillmann of Laboratoire Archéomatériaux et Prévision de l’Altération: LMC IRAMAT UMR5060 CNRS et NIMBE UMR3685 CEA/CNRS, France; and Dr Christophe Cloquet of the Petrography and Geological Research Centre in Nancy, France.