Methodological frameworks investigating settlement patterns in various global regions have greatly enhanced our general knowledge of past urban centres, cities, and other large-scale settlements. Models have been developed based on extensive fieldwork that provide insights into lifeways for various segments of societies, moving beyond an understanding only the most visible members of communities. Along these lines, this paper considers current trends in the study of large-scale settlements of South and Southeast Asia, and how global practices in settlement archaeology can suggest complementary and innovative approaches. For many cases in these regions, it is often the core and oftentimes bounded spaces – filled with monumental architecture and obvious material indicators of higher status, wealth, and power – that receive the most attention. However, the surrounding, hinterland areas can provide vital datasets to expand knowledge and even challenge long-held assumptions about urbanism in these regions. What kinds of habitation data have traditionally been available, and what are still needed? How do such data inform our understanding of everyday life and of larger sociopolitical developments? Besides elite buildings, monuments, and residential spaces, what kinds of features and artifact classes can also be emphasized in studies? For instance, can we recognize contrasting practices of water management on state-level versus household scales? Investigations of residences, gardening practices, and other cultural phenomena on a micro-scale can be interwoven with macro-scale information, as related to regional political economies, region-wide infrastructures of transportation and exchange, and intensified forms of food and craft production. Ultimately, studies of settlements in these regions can contribute to novel ways of theorizing alternative forms of past urbanism that thrived in tropical environments, while also illuminating trajectories of social change and human-environmental relationships that do not easily confirm to traditional models of urbanism, social complexity, and state formation as developed elsewhere.