Maritime Silk Road Ceramics And Indian Ocean Networks, 200-1400 CE

Abstract

This article reconstructs the maritime trade networks of the Indian Ocean between 200 BCE and 1400 CE through the ceramic evidence recovered from Southeast Asian port cities, shipwrecks, and burial sites. Drawing on archaeological assemblages spanning Indian Rouletted Ware, Tang-dynasty Changsha bowls from the Belitung shipwreck (c. 826 CE), Song-Yuan celadons and blue-and-white porcelains, and locally produced Thai and Vietnamese trade wares, the study traces the evolving structure of maritime exchange shaped by the monsoon wind system. The analysis challenges the conventional model of a unidirectional flow from advanced Chinese and Indian producers to passive Southeast Asian consumers. Instead, the ceramic record reveals that Southeast Asian entrepôts—Srivijayan ports, Philippine chieftaincies, and Javanese coastal polities—functioned as active agents in shaping demand, mediating redistribution, and assigning new cultural and political meanings to imported objects. The Belitung wreck demonstrates the industrial scale of ninth-century Chinese ceramic exports, while Philippine elite burial assemblages reveal the political instrumentalization of trade goods in competitive prestige economies. The article argues that no single maritime power dominated the Indian Ocean trade; rather, a shifting constellation of overlapping regional circuits, sustained by monsoon navigation, diverse shipbuilding traditions, and the complementary resources of ecologically distinct littoral societies, constituted an interconnected world economy in which Southeast Asian port cities were as essential as the kilns that supplied them.