Southeast Asian Caves

The caves of Southeast Asia represent an invaluable resource for undertaking geoarchaeological research given the rich cultural record stored and preserved within them. However, they are challenging environments not least because the processes responsible for their inception and evolution, sediment delivery to them, and the preservation and degradation of sediments within them, are very poorly understood relative to their counterparts in temperate and arid zones. A lack of reference and analogue datasets that model geomorphic responses to climate change in tropical regions hampers our ability to link changes in environment and climate to features in cave sediment records. Despite this, the extensive carbonate geology of Southeast Asia is characterized by an abundance of suitable caves that have served as important foci throughout human evolutionary history.