a protégé of louis leakey. During the 1970s Isaac helped desmond clark establish the University of California, Berkeley, as a center for the study of African archaeology. In 1983 he transferred to Harvard University.

Isaac became one of the most significant prehistoric archaeologists of his generation as a result of his brilliant excavation of major sites in East Africa such as olorgesailie, Naivasha, and Peninj and his novel and challenging interpretations of hominid behavior occurring millions of years ago. From 1970 until his early death he was codirector with Richard Leakey of the East Turkana Research Project, which contributed a great deal of new information about fossil hominids and the environments in which they lived. He was also responsible for educating, encouraging, and working with a new generation of African archaeologists from African nations. Isaac died at a tragically young age, very much at the height of his powers.

Tim Murray

References

Isaac, G.U. 1977. Olorgesailie: An Archaeological Study of a Middle Pleistocene Lake Basin in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago.

———. 1989. The Archaeology of Human Origins. Papers by Glyn Isaac. Ed. B. Isaac. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Island Southeast Asia

This essay includes both prehistoric and historical archaeology. The definition of Island Southeast Asia depends on the distinction between Island Southeast Asia and Mainland Southeast Asia. This definition was made at the Eleventh Pacific Science Congress, held in Tokyo in 1966, and was approved as Resolution 2.2 of the Congress (Solheim 1967a, 2). This resolution presented, for the first time, the terms Mainland Southeast Asia and Island Southeast Asia. The ad hoc committee of the Anthropology Division of the Congress that submitted this resolution, first to the Anthropology Division and then to the Council of the Pacific Science Association, further presented tentative boundaries as follows: “Mainland Southeast Asia would extend from the thirtieth parallel of latitude (approximately the Yangzi River) to the south as far as Singapore, and from the Irrawaddy River to the South China Sea; Island Southeast would include all the islands off the coast of Mainland Southeast Asia, from Formosa around to the Andaman Islands” (Solheim 1967a, 3; 1967b, 896). As presented and as used here, both terms are capitalized. For the record, the ad hoc committee that developed these terms was made up of Tom Harrisson, R.P. Soejono, and the author.

There was little communication between historical and prehistoric archaeologists working in Southeast Asia until recently. Historical archaeologists have been interested primarily in monumental architecture and art (stone and bronze sculpture in particular) and have done very little excavation. An attempt to bring historians, historical archaeologists, and prehistoric archaeologists together on the transition from prehistoric to historic times in Southeast Asia was the “London Colloquy on Early South East Asia” held in 1973 (Smith and Watson 1979). Until recently, historical archaeologists depended primarily on ancient Chinese records for the interpretation of their finds previous to European contact in the area.

Art history has been an important approach to historical archaeology but, unfortunately, there has also been little communication between archaeologists involved in prehistoric archaeology and art historians. In an attempt to bring art historians and archaeologists together, a symposium on “Early Chinese Art and its Possible Influence in the Pacific Basin” was organized by the Department of Art History and Archaeology of Columbia University (Barnard 1972). While art historians were saying that Chinese art styles, primarily of late Chou times, were an important influence on Pacific Basin art, in part by way of the spread of Dongson art through Indonesia into the Pacific, archaeologists were pointing out that virtually all of the specific examples presented were earlier in Southeast Asia than in china and that the influence was Southeast Asian rather than Chinese. There was little communication between the two different approaches.

It is not possible to establish a universal periodization for this history as to some extent each country (and even each portion of a country as