Archaeologists have long sought to identify the key indicators which would allow them to measure the level and rate of cultural development. Technology and energy capture are two of the indicators which have been proposed, but there are grounds for objecting that these are still variables dependent on another factor: the capacity of a culture to record and process information. The communication of information has been studied by archaeologists but their paradigms, such as the diffusionist model, have been found wanting and discarded. The goal of studying ancient communication processes is an ideal, but achieving it with the data available to archaeologists will be very difficult.

Based on archaeological evidence from the Phimai region and elsewhere in Northeast Thailand, late prehistoric exchange patterns, focused on local and regional centres of redistribution and perhaps markets, formed the foundation of the Khmer temple and market centred economy. Early regional exchange networks and the Khmer economic system into which they evolved were adaptive responses to the unpredictability of a monsoonal climate.

Archaeological research at the Yarang complex of moated sites in Pattani demonstrates that this was an early historic Buddhist ceremonial centre and a later Islamic fortification, but probably not the early trade centre called Langkasuka. At Kerisik archaeological evidence supports the identification of this complex as the location of the fifteenth-eighteenth century trading port city of Patani.

An analysis of the archaeological data available in recent years indicates the development of local maritime networks both in peninsular Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent by the middle of the first millennium B.C. By the second-first centuries B.C. these networks formed a part of the larger regional sailing circuit in the Bay of Bengal. Tangible indicators of this are carnelian and glass beads and bronze bowls with a high tin content. A demarcation of these networks is essential, before questions like the organization of trade or the channels through which religious ideology spread, can be explained.

The war between Bangkok and the Lao in the years 1827–29 constitutes a watershed in the relations between the Thai and the Lao. Up to now, this conflict has been accounted for largely by only one source: The Royal Chronicles of the Third Reign of the Bangkok Dynasty by Chao Phraya Thiphakarawong. It is time to go beyond this, and to explore the available Lao annals, Vietnamese primary documents, the archives of the Thai National Library and the accounts of western travellers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This paper also introduces Lao historiography and historians who have written about the war.

This paper combines historical with anthropological evidence on the relationship between Christianity and messianism among the Hmong of Southeast Asia and China. The lack of literacy is a motivating factor in Hmong Christian conversions. Messianism is seen as a reaction to Christian conversion, which encourages the alienation of minority groups.