Southeast Asian Pleistocene archaeology has been plagued by the imposition of models based on the archaeological sequences of Europe, and especially Northwest Europe. The term Palaeolithic, meaning literally Old Stone Age, was coined by English aristocrat John Lubbock in 1865, and subdivided by French priest L’Abbe Breuil in 1912 into Lower, Middle, and Upper Palaeolithic. These subdivisions were, based on types of stone artifacts on the one hand and homi-nin fossil types on the other, fitted into a uniform time frame.
To summarize briefly, the Lower Palaeolithic represents the earliest Homo species including H. erectus (now called H. ergaster in Africa and H. heidelber-gensis, and other things, in Europe). The first human ancestors (variously named, but including H. habilis) were associated with stone artifacts considered to be technically primitive, often made on pebbles (technically cobbles) and referred to as ‘chopper’ and ‘chopping tools’. The chronologically later and more phylogenetically advanced H. erectus types were associated with a particular stone artifact form, the ‘hand ax’, a bifacial implement made on a large core, which occurred in huge numbers at many sites across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India within the vast time span of the Lower and Middle Pleistocene, c. 1.5 million to 100 000 years ago. In Europe, the succeeding Middle Palaeolithic phase, dated between 100 and 40 000 years, is the time of the Neanderthals (H. sapiens neanderthalensis), whose evolutionary status has long been problematic, but who is now considered not to have been ancestral to modern humans. Their stone tools were flake tools rather than core tools, and come in a range of recurring forms generally referred to as points and scrapers. The Upper Palaeolithic (c. 40 000-c. 10 000 years) sees the arrival of fully modern humans using a more refined range of points and scrapers, often made on long slender flakes called blades, and also featuring a range of artifacts made of bone and antler. This is also the period of the renowned naturalistic cave art of France and Spain.
Many problems have arisen with the interpretation of the archaeological record outside Europe by
Attempts to fit it into this Lower-Middle-Upper Palaeolithic model, and Southeast Asia is no exception. In 1948, American archaeologist Hallam Movius Jr., who had worked on European Palaeolithic sites, surveyed what was then known of the Asian archaeological record, and concluded that there were significant differences between Europe and the east. His most celebrated observation was that there were no hand axes in Asia, east of the Himalayas, and what was found in the Far East was a more primitive stone tool repertoire, consisting of ‘choppers and chopping tools’, and that this continued for thousands of years. The implication was that the latter was a hangover from a more primitive past, which had somehow not attained the advanced stage of manufacturing hand axes, let alone the far more progressive level of the Middle Palaeolithic. This was explicitly stated in his observation that ‘‘throughout the early portion of the Old Stone Age the tools consist for the most part of relatively monotonous and unimaginative assemblages of choppers, chopping tools and hand-adzes.....
The archaeological...material very definitely indicates that as early as Lower Palaeolithic times Southern and Eastern Asia as a whole was a region of cultural retardation’’ {Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 38 (1948): 329-420). This is indeed a restatement of an earlier comment by the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin {Early Man in China (1941): 60): ‘‘In contrast with the already ‘steaming’ West, Early Pleistocene Eastern Asia seems to have represented {on account of its marginal geographic position) a quiet and conservative corner amidst the fast advancing human world’’.
The racist implications of these statements are obvious, and have been dealt with previously in many places. It is however interesting that the overall concept of the Movius Line is perpetuated in textbooks and syntheses with little modification from the 1940s, if without the racist overtones. It is in general true that bifacial hand ax forms do not occur in the east, although there are some exceptions, such as the Chinese site of Dingcun. It is not however the case that what fills that void are ‘primitive’ chopper-chopping types. It needs to be observed that Movius {and Teilhard) were working primarily with collections of artifacts from undated surface collections, apart from the excavated material from the celebrated site of Zhoukoudian (Choukoutien) in China, ‘home of Peking Man’ {H. erectus). Even here however the dominant artifacts are not chopper/chopping tools; rather, the assemblage of artifacts which are clearly associated with H. erectus is dominated by small quartz flakes, many manufactured by the bipolar flaking technique. The hominin occupation at Zhoukoudian is rather younger than most of the
Javanese fossils, ranging from about 400 000 to perhaps 250 000 years ago.
There is however in Southeast Asia a range of tools which can be characterized as chopper/chopping tools, but they are not in fact the primitive artifacts that Teilhard and Movius, and some more recent scholars, have taken them to be.
World History
