Stasis or stimulus? Exotic materials and social display in Southeast Asia: Response to Pfaffenberger

This paper assesses the relationship between metallurgy and social change in prehistoric Thailand. One model proposes that for about 15 centuries after circa 2000 BCE, peaceful village communities, being acquainted with copper-base metallurgy through contact with northern stimuli, cast small personal ornaments with little if any innovations in casting technology or social change. The introduction of iron likewise had little social impact. A recent review of three volumes proposing this paradigm supports it while criticizing an alternative, which sees the advent of bronze technology as a direct stimulus to the rise of states. Based on hundreds of new radiocarbon determinations that reveal that the first copper-base axes and ornaments date to circa 1100–1000 BCE, this paper describes how the first copper-base implements and ornaments coincided with a rapid rise of socially elite aggrandizers living at the choke point of a natural exchange route. But this lasted for only six to eight generations, with no enduring social impact. Nor did iron per se engender social change. Rather, a nexus of interacting stimuli involving climate change and an agricultural revolution led to the rapid rise of early states.