Prehistory in West Malaysia (Malaya) commences with a possible Pleistocene assemblage (Kota Tampan), but the first coherent and widespread industry is the Hoabinhian (Gua Cha, Gua Kechil). Neolithic assemblages of probable Thai origin appear in north and central Malaya after 2800 bc (Gua Cha, Gua Kechil). The sequence in most of inland Malaya is clearly tied to Aslian (austro-asiatic) ancestry, and Austronesian (‘Malay’) settlement on the coasts (after 1000 bc, probably from west Borneo) is undocumented archaeologically. It is not known when the first contacts between the Malay Peninsula and India developed, but it was most likely well before the beginning of the Christian Era. Chinese sources mention petty Indian states as early as the 2nd century ad and the earliest Sanskrit inscriptions appear in the 4th century. By then the northern part of the Peninsula had come under the suzerainty of the CAMBODiA-based kingdom of Funan, while a number of independent Indianized kingdoms continued to exist further to the south. One of the more important of these was that of P’an-P’an (5th-7th centuries) which served as a relay station between India and the rest of Southeast Asia; see also Kuala Selinsing. Soon after the Sumatran kingdom of Srivij-aya came into being in the late 7th century it gained footholds on the Malay Peninsula, and exercised suzerainty over much of the Peninsula until succeeded in the 13th century by the Javanese kingdom of SinghasAri and the Thai kingdom of Sukhothai. From the following century come the first signs of the Islamization of the Peninsula. In the 15th century the Islamic trading state of Malacca developed into a major entrepôt of world trade. For East Malaysia (the states of Sarawak and Sabah), see Borneo.
The Macmillan dictionary of archaeology, Ruth D. Whitehouse, 1983Copied