From Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene in Sundaland

The geographical focus of this chapter is the region known generally as ‘Sundaland’, that is the Malay Peninsula and the islands of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and adjacent small island groups. These locations lie on the extensive and now mainly submerged Sunda continental shelf, which during the Last Glacial Maximum (c. 18 000 BP) would have been fully exposed as a subcontinent with an area of more than two million square kilometres ( Fig. 13.1 ). The Quaternary literature published over the past two decades indicates that the environmental changes that swept this region between 18 000 and 6000 years ago would have had the potential to be very dramatic indeed, particularly those correlated with the rise in sea-level of over 100 m.