The initial states of Thailand were the polities that held the territory of present-day Thailand before the rise of Sukhothai and the Ayutthaya Kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries. They include Funan and the peninsular kingdoms of Langkasuka and Tambralinga, the Dvaravati towns of the Chao Phraya plain, and the port polities that Chinese records call Xiān.
Most are known from a thin and uneven record. Chinese annals supply names and tribute dates, inscriptions are few and widely scattered, and the archaeology has been read in more than one way, so that the extent of these polities, and in some cases whether they were polities at all rather than shared cultures, remains disputed. How far their development was driven from outside the region is disputed as well, and later work has credited local societies with more agency in taking up Indic models than earlier scholarship allowed.
Prehistoric populations
The Indochinese peninsula was inhabited long before the southward migration of the Tai from Guangxi. Its earliest widely recognised culture is the Hoabinhian, a lithic industry and long-term tradition of stone tools and flaked cobble artefacts found in caves and rock shelters, which emerged around 10,000 BP. First identified at sites in Hòa Bình, Vietnam, the Hoabinhian was later documented in Terengganu, Malaysia, Sumatra, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Yunnan, southern China.
Iron Age burials of the later prehistoric period show craft specialists interred with the tools of their trade, and graves clustering in groups that have been read as clans. At Ongbah Cave in Kanchanaburi the dead were laid in hardwood coffins carved with birds' heads and buried with beads, bronze and iron tools and weapons, some of the spears deliberately broken. Graves along the lower rivers have yielded Indian beads and figurines and high-tin bronze bowls. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit note that no arsenals have been found and that there is no definite proof of fortification in this period. Charles Higham is similarly cautious about political form. Much more must be known, he writes, before it can be concluded that hereditary chiefs lived in central places and controlled lesser sites around them, and if they existed they have not yet been found. He does trace continuity of place into the historic period in the upper Mun valley, where the final Iron Age phase of the 4th and 5th centuries CE runs into the foundation of the first brick temples. An Iron Age cemetery lies beneath the main sanctuary at Prasat Phanom Wan on the same orientation as the temple, and Iron Age deposits at Ban Suai on the outskirts of Phimai lead into the brick temple there.
Austroasiatic Mon and Khmer groups, believed to have originated in northeastern India, predominately populated the riverine lowlands of Indochina from around 5,000 BP. Austronesian migrants later arrived along the coast of what is now central Vietnam around 2,500 BP.
The controversial Two layer hypothesis proposes a later migration of agricultural populations from the Yangtze River valley around 3,000 BP. These groups are thought to have introduced wet-rice and millet farming to mainland Southeast Asia.
Chew reports an archaeogenetic study of rice remains from Thai sites by Cristina Castillo and her colleagues. The grains cultivated and consumed from about 1050 to 420 BCE were of the japonica subspecies rather than indica. The peninsular sites with the earliest Indian contact, Khao Sam Kaeo and Phu Khao Thong, yielded no japonica in their Bronze Age levels, and indica appears only in the first centuries of the historic period. Chew reads this as showing that the exchange behind early rice cultivation in northeastern and southern Thailand ran to China rather than India.
Ban Chiang in northeastern Thailand has been read as the earliest centre of copper and bronze production in Southeast Asia, on a date of about 2000 BCE. The date is disputed. Baker and Pasuk place the appearance of bronze at about 1250 to 1000 BCE, while noting that others argue for 2000 to 1800 BCE.
Sing C. Chew, surveying the debate, describes the two positions as a long chronology, which dates the adoption of bronze to about 2000 BCE, and a short chronology of about 1200 to 1000 BCE. The disagreement extends to the source of the technology. Joyce White and Elizabeth Hamilton proposed that metalworkers trained in the Seima-Turbino tradition of the Eurasian steppe reached northeast Thailand and northern Vietnam about 2000 BCE by a route that bypassed the Central Plain of China. Higham and his colleagues instead derive the technology from the Central Plain by way of the Yangtze valley and Lingnan, in the second half of the second millennium BCE. They question the dating of the Ban Chiang bronzes and point to the scarcity of Seima-Turbino material in the region.
Settlement of the Iron Age and the centuries that follow is unevenly known. Miriam Stark reports that sites of the period lie along secondary drainages rather than the main river courses, in side valleys with richer alluvium and less destructive flooding. On the Chao Phraya the middle of the system, from below Sing Buri down to Ayutthaya and the coast, may have stood under the sea as late as about the turn of the era. Marine clays as much as 14 m deep cover it. That stretch has yielded no late prehistoric or early historic sites. Stark reports Bennet Bronson's view that flood deposits have buried them rather than that no one lived there. Sites are known instead along the western, eastern and northern edges of the basin.
Surveys in the Lopburi area report centralisation with satellite settlements, a marked increase in bronze working and the adoption of iron by about 500 BCE. Stark puts the beginning of the central-place hierarchy of the following period no earlier than about 500 CE. Karen Mudar's survey of the same district found only a weak association between sites and wet-rice cultivation before that date, and suggests that dryland farming continued in much of the region.
Early states
The earliest known records of a political entity in Indochina are associated with Funan, which was centred in the Mekong Delta and encompassed territories within present-day Thailand. Chinese annals attest to Funan's existence as early as the 1st century CE, while archaeological evidence indicates extensive human settlement in the region since at least the 4th century BCE.
The kingdoms of Langkasuka and Tambralinga on the Malay Peninsula appear in Chinese sources by the 5th century CE. Alongside Funan, these polities are commonly described as Indianized kingdoms, having adopted elements of Indian culture, religion, political organisation, administration, epigraphy, literature, and architecture following centuries of trade and socio-economic interaction with the Indian subcontinent.National Library of Australia. Asia's French Connection: George Coedès and the Coedès Collection Pierre-Yves Manguin argues that the adoption was selective and locally driven. He holds that Vaiṣṇava bhakti, closely tied to kingship, was a major factor in state formation between the 5th and 7th centuries, beginning in the Thai-Malay peninsula and on the mainland in the early 5th century, and that it followed a millennium of trade contact rather than a sudden transfer. A comparable pattern has been read in craft production. Hsiao-chun Hung and Peter Bellwood describe finished ornaments being imported first and local manufacture in foreign materials and techniques following afterwards. Higham likewise reports local industries established under Indian inspiration, or by Indian settlement, at sites such as Khao Sam Kaeo.
Yurayong and colleagues describe several seals from Khao Sam Kaeo as local imitations of the stamp marks of South Asian trade authorities. On one, a misplaced anusvāra turns the name Ananda into a form unattested in Indic. Another is inscribed in correct Brāhmī with a local name, Pākabi, and is made of lead, a material common in southern Thailand and not in South Asia. They take the seals to show local control of certified production by craftsmen who need not have known the script they were copying.
The same spread can be followed in two distributions. Yurayong and colleagues map 777 inscriptions dated between the third century BCE and the ninth century CE. The earliest cluster lies in present-day southern Thailand, on the routes across the peninsula, and no Tai–Kadai language appears in the epigraphy of the early first millennium CE. Inscriptions in more than one language are common throughout. Settlement names show two opposite movements. The Sanskrit elements dhānī, nagara and puri spread from south to north, while Middle Chinese *dzyeng 'fortress' spread from north to south with Tai–Kadai migration and survives in Shan keng and Northern Thai ciaŋ.
Dvaravati
The Dvaravati principalities emerged during the middle of the first millennium CE in the lower Chao Phraya River valley of present-day central Thailand. The name rests on a small body of evidence. Medallions inscribed with the Sanskrit phrase śrīdvāravatīśvarapuṇya, "merit of the lord of glorious Dvaravati", were first found at Nakhon Pathom and at about ten other sites on the plain. A traveller from Annam took the robe at To-lo-po-ti early in the 7th century, and Xuanzang and Yijing recorded a country of that name lying between Sri Ksetra and Isanapura without going there. Three tribute missions reached the Tang court under the name, in 638, 640 and 649.
Between the 6th and 12th centuries some forty moated towns grew up across the plain, most of them beside rivers, sharing religious practice, art styles and the use of Mon for inscriptions, but showing no sign of political integration beyond, perhaps, local confederations. Art historians afterwards made Dvaravati the label for a body of styles and for the period in which they flourished, and stretched that far across space and time the name carried its political sense with it. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit hold that the styles travelled with trade rather than with political authority. Wyatt divides the same ground into three regions with different economies and outlooks, a seaward west from Phetchaburi to Suphan Buri, a more urbanised east centred on Lopburi and standing within the Angkorian cultural orbit, and a northern frontier on the Yom and Nan where incoming and resident populations mixed. He also holds that ethnic labels are anachronistic for the period and prefers geographical terms, writing of the ruler of a named town rather than of a Thai or Khmer ruler.
Dvaravati has often been described as comparatively isolated from the international trade network in which Funan, Langkasuka and Tambralinga stood. That isolation, on later readings, is relative to the sea rather than absolute. Tatsuo Hoshino argues for a substantial overland network across the middle Mekong linking Champa and the Gulf of Tonkin with the Menam basin, with Lopburi at its western end. Foreign material is widespread on the plain, a third-century Roman coin and Indian, Tang and Persian pottery among it. Compositional analysis of 186 glass beads from ten sites identified Chinese and Middle Eastern groups, though most are of Indian or Sri Lankan origin. Most of the surviving religious material is Buddhist rather than Brahmanical.
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