Eyewitness Accounts of the Early Mining and Smelting of Metals in Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

In Southeast Asia, as in many other parts of the world, the student of premodern technology is not likely to find that much relevant data exists in indigenous historical documents. He must therefore adopt other approaches: studies of historical and archaeological objects in museums, excavations of early industrial sites, inferences from general theory, and comparisons with those traditional techniques that survived long enough to be recorded by outside observers