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Easy overseas communication did not, however, result in the formation of territorially large kingdoms. The many estuaries of Sumatra and Borneo, facing the inland seas, possessed an abundance of nutritious seafood that made possible a settled mode of life, and the contacts between the people of one estuary and their neighbours were more important to them than those they could make with overseas lands. Indonesian maritime history is the story of the efforts of local groups, endowed with more or less comparable resources, to protect their separate identities. The same local interests prevailed on the island of Java, where the lava-enriched soil, watered by gently flowing rivers, encouraged wet-rice production and a patchwork pattern of settled areas in the river valleys separated by mountains and jungle. Long before records begin, many of these coastal and riverine groups were evolving an elementary form of hierarchy, accompanied by the craftsmen's tokens of rank. No single group was large enough to overrun and occupy neighbouring territories; its energies were absorbed rather by an ever more intensive exploitation of its own natural resources. Those living on or close to the sea knew that geographic isolation was out of the question but regarded their maritime environment as a means of enhancing their well-being through imports or new skills. Looking outward, far from inculcating a sense of belonging to larger communities, encouraged the pursuit of local interests. Thus, the structure of Indonesian written and oral sources suggests to historians that the origins of kingdoms on the coasts of the Java Sea were associated with the success of local heroes in turning the arrival of foreign trading treasure to their advantage.

Indonesian place-names have frequently remained unchanged since the beginning of documented history. In these often nearby places, each leader saw himself at the centre of the world that mattered to him, which was not, until later, the archipelago or even a single island but his own strip of coast or river valley. Some centres achieved local hegemony but never to the extent of extinguishing permanently the pretensions of rival centres. Thus, the early history of Indonesia is compounded of many regional histories that only gradually impinge on each other.

The historical fragmentation of the archipelago, sustained by its rich climate and accentuated rather than offset by easy access to the outside world, is reflected in its languages. Scholars have debated the location of the areas outside Indonesia from which the speakers of the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages originally came: the Asian mainland and the Pacific islands have been proposed. 

What is significant for the historian, however, is that the speakers of these languages almost certainly drifted into the region in small groups over long periods of time and did not suddenly assume a common identity when they reached the coasts and rivers of the archipelago. On the contrary, they remained scattered groups, sometimes coexisting with descendants of earlier Pleistocene populations, who, in their turn, had also learned to make economic use of their environment over an immense span of cultural time. The perhaps 200 languages within the Western, or Indonesian, branch of the Austronesian family are an index of the manner in which the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago submitted to the realities of their landscape. 

The historian, examining stone or metal inscriptions, which, together with surviving copies of early religious texts, are the important sources of documentary information, must remember that the evidence is always concerned with specific places. Comprehensive narrative histories of extensive areas cannot be written. The reality behind interregional relationships must often remain a riddle. The historian's task is the study of cultural history in widely scattered groups of society rather than narrative accounts of still very indistinct kingdoms; it is the investigation of beliefs shared by the ruling classes and the peasantry and of the points of contact between them. The ideas of men of rank were articulated in architecture and literature, reflecting varying degrees of exposure to influences outside the archipelago, but all groups of the population subscribed to basic assumptions concerning dependence of people on the goodwill of the gods.

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