Problems in Contemporary Asian Archeology

Archeology in Asia during the past twenty years has taken great strides. The three main areas of new research have been in paleoanthropology, investigation of post-pleistocene neolithic sites, and ethnology. The population of Asia is now known to have been distributed over the entire mainland and Indonesia during the Paleolithic period which embraced the first million years of human evolution. There is growing evidence for the existence of many centers of plant domestication in Asia, each of which appears to have developed out of an indigenous “mesolithic” period of collecting and gathering. Recent research in linguistics and ethnology point the way to unravelling the separate histories of Asia's many cultures.