Human Adaptation to Coastal Evolution: Late Quaternary evidence from Southeast Asia (SUNDASIA) – A report on the third year of the project

The SUNDASIA project is centred in the Tràng An limestone massif, a World Heritage Site (WHS) of Ninh Binh province, northern Vietnam. Initially, a 3.5-year programme, scheduled to conclude at the end of December 2019, the project has been extended to the end of December 2020. Principal funding has come from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) allocation of the British Government’s ‘Global Challenges Research Fund’ (GCRF) and the Xuan Truong Construction Enterprise, which is also responsible for establishing and managing property infrastructure within Tràng An. The programme of research being undertaken is examining how changing coastal conditions between the Late Pleistocene and Mid-Holocene, impacted on early human behaviour and settlement patterns. Furthermore, it also draws on prehistoric evidence in order to inform modern-day responses to sea-level change and the associated socio-economic challenges that will result. This annual project report briefly summarises work during the period from the end of 2018 to early 2020. It draws on recent published and presented research outputs as well as project grey literature, in the form of field reports, that are submitted and lodged with the Tràng An Management Board. The report is divided into three sections; each section relates to one of the central exploratory themes of the project.