Southeast Asia's earliest states emerged during the first millennium A.D. from the Irawaddy River of Myanmar to the Red River delta of northern Vietnam. Developments during this time laid the groundwork for the florescence of the region's later and better-known civilizations such as Angkor and Pagan. Yet disciplinary and language barriers have thus far precluded an anthropological synthesis of cultural developments during this time. This review uses a landscape focus to synthesize current knowledge of mainland Southeast Asia's earliest states, which emerged in the first millennium A.D. Research from archaeology and history illuminates articulations between physical and social factors in several kinds of Early Southeast Asian landscapes: economic, urban, and political. Social and ideological forces that shaped these first-millennium-A.D. landscapes are discussed as integral aspects of early state formation.

Interest in the material correlates of economic specialization has led to numerous quantitative studies of standardization (or the lack of it) in craft production, particularly of ceramics. Most of this research has focused on measures of variation and conventional statistical procedures in the treatment of the empirical data, many of which are dependent on unrealistic assumptions (such as normal populations), yielding results that can be questioned. To resolve this crisis more robust statistical methods are investigated including the “jackknife” method (for confidence interval construction) and a multigroup test for homogeneity of variance known as the Brown-Forsythe Test. Computer simulations show that the latter is robust under a variety of distributional forms. These new methods are used to reanalyze ethnoarchaeological ceramic data from the Philippines; it is shown that markedly different conclusions can be reached when compared with the results of more conventional procedures.

Ceramic production and exchange have become important issues in archaeological research on specialization and state formation. As one form of craft specialization, intensified ceramic production constitutes a common alternative to farming in societies faced with land shortages. Ceramic specialization is commonly practised at the community level, but little is known about the conditions under which village‐level specialization develops. Ethnoarchaeological research in the northern Philippines documents specialized ceramic production at the community‐level and embeds ceramic production into a regional system of community‐based productive specialization. This Kalinga study provides insights on the process of emergent ceramic specialization.