The built heritage of nomadic coastal communities in Southeast Asia

Abstract This paper investigates the built environment of traditional maritime adapted ‘sea nomads’ of the Andaman Sea. For centuries, groups of people with a maritime adapted subsistence strategy have lived in small groups distributed widely across the islands and coasts of the Andaman Sea and South China Sea, moving constantly between the variable coastal eco-niches, in a revolving kaleidoscope of reconfigured social patterns, to maximise access to fish, marine mammals and shellfish. To maintain the resilience and sustainability of this maritime subsistence strategy, the Chaw Lay have evolved an adaptive culture based on and characterised by mobility – physical mobility, artifact mobility and social mobility. Mobility is also characteristic of their built environment, which is based on a distinctive modular and recyclable construction technology. All of their structures are improvised with primary materials available in the immediate coastal environment occupied by the Chaw Lay, Using these materials, the Chaw Lay construct a variety of simple utilitarian structures all of which are based on the simple form of a ‘rack’ – ad-hoc, pre-fab, moveable and reusable – adapted to the coastal environment, tropical climate, and monsoon weather. This paper then examines the implications of this technological style for archaeological retrieval and interpretation. If – as this paper demonstrates to be the case with the Chaw Lay built environment – structures of a specific cultural groups are all constructed in accordance with a culturally pre-determined modular construction technology, an assessment can be made of the degree to which of a small archaeological sample can be understood to be an accurate and representative proxy for the whole of the society’s build environment.