Research & Article

The Phuket Project aims to model all aspects of the Chaw Lay maritime adaptive strategy in order to understand how various activities, and their evolutionary sequence, can be identified in the archaeological record. This paper describes the previous work of the project, focusing on the palimpsest of sites representing four levels of socio-economic organization, from temporary base camp, through base settlement, to sites in distress and in a state of collapse. New research at the same, and additional sites, in Phuket is described and analyzed for the ways in which it adds to our understanding of the various levels of complexity. The paper ends with a discussion of the networks formed by these sites and how they act as safety nets to maintain the adaptation regardless of the pressures which change, stress and time might impose on them. The value of this research is the opportunity it has given to add a temporal dimension to ethno-archaeological work.