As the smallest and only landlocked country of Southeast Asia, the history and practice of archaeology in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (hereafter Laos) has been strongly influenced by activities of its neighbours, especially Vietnam. The earliest mentions of Laos in western archaeological literature are due to the activities of the French government in Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam), specifically the Geological Service of Indochina and the École Française d’Extrême-Orient. By the 1930s publications were appearing by GSA and EFEO officials that indicated a cultural chronology from the Late Pleistocene (Tam Hang - Arambourg and Fromaget, 1938) through to the late Holocene (The Plain of Jars - Colani, 1932). The history of these early French archaeologists has been well described elsewhere (Malleret, 1969, Saurin, 1971, White and Bouasisengpaseuth, 2008), here we will concentrate on how that work, and more recent research, has added to our current understanding of the origins, behavior, and identities of the prehistoric human populations of Laos, as well as their biological, linguistic and cultural diversity and commonalities.
Depositional history of a talus cone in an arid intermontane basin in Central Asia: An interdisciplinary study at the Late Pleistocene–Late Holocene Obishir‐I site, Kyrgyzstan