As I finish up the annotated bibliography for the final project, I find that I am still frustrated with the problems I face defining historical archaeology within Island Southeast Asia. For the purposes of my paper, I chose to define historical archaeology as text-aided archaeology, yet this doesn’t really capture the problems inherent in using Deetz’ definition of an archaeology that studies European influences and the spread of capitalism post-1500 for this region of the world. The major problem with applying that definition to Indonesia is that the area experienced contact with other colonial powers such as India and China many centuries prior to European contact, and the region was a central player in pan-regional capitalist trade networks. I’m not sure that I have truly solved this conundrum in how I think about historical archaeology in this region, but others have suggested the use of the more specific term Colonial archaeology to define the archaeology of post-European contact in the region. This solves the issue of temporal discontinuities, but it does still impose several assumptions, namely that only European colonial powers have the ability to impact/affect/destroy indigenous systems.