A Summary Of Archaeological Studies In Malaysia

Peninsular Malaysia is located at the southern tip of the Southeast Asian mainland,its position is important in the restriction of movements of man and animals from mainland Asia to Island Southeast Asia and vice-versa.In the late history of Southeast Asia,it also seems to be the major maritime trade centre between the western and the eastern.As a result,Peninsular Malaysia has an amount of valuable archaeological sites.The period of these sites started from Palaeolithic period,through hoabinhian period,Neolithic period,until modern times.Most of the archaeology sites are been excavated from limestone shelters and caves that near the river.This is because the Peninsular Malaysia is on the equator,this causes a huge average levels of rainfall.These limestone shelter and caves become a suitable resting place for man.The archaeology work of’ Peninsular Malaysia began at the year of 1897,but it is getting less attentions from Chinese scholars.This is the reason I wrote this paper.Through this paper,I hope that scholars from Chinese can know more things about archaeology in Peninsular Malaysia.Besides that,I will compare the Haobinhian and Neolithic culture with the archaeology culture of China,to observe if there have any influence between Malaysia and China.This paper consists of three parts:introduction,main text and conclusion.The contents of introductions mainly explain the motivation and significance of this paper,and then introduces the geographical location and cultural significance of the Peninsular Malaysia.The main text is divided into two chapter.The first chapter is reviews the history of Archaeology of Peninsular Malaysia at first,then introduce some important archaeology sites of Peninsular Malaysia to the timeline,because of the lack of the translation of archaeology data to Chinese.The beginning of the history of thearchaeology of Peninsular Malaysia was from the western archaeologist,and stopped at the time of The Second World War,then a lot of archaeology sites been destroyed by the war between the Malaysia.Communise and the British Army.After the independent of Malaysia,the government co-operate with the western archaeologists and hire them as university professors.After that,the archaeology activities start to stop again because of the political problems of the Malaysia Government.The second chapter is about the concept of Hoabinhian and theHoabinhian archaeology sites.Then this paper takes Gua Cha as an example,and compare with the culture of Chui Ping Shan at the southern part of China.The last part of this paper is conclusion,and will discuss the relationship between Peninsular Malaysia and China.Although the lack of current information,but nowadays,the archaeology excavations in Malaysia and China are more and more,so sure will be more evident be found.Besides that,a lot of archaeology methods from China can be learnt by Malaysia to improve the efficiency and quality of the excavation.