‘Lapita colonists leave boats unburned!’ The question of Lapita links with Island Southeast Asia

Antiquity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (240) ◽  
pp. 613-622 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bellwood ◽  
Peter Koon
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Source Zone ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
New Britain

‘Not another trendy and incomprehensible title,’ some will sigh. No, the title means what it states, albeit with metaphorical flourish. The Lapita cultural complex of Melanesia and western Polynesia, an entity beloved of a generation of Pacific prehistorians and ever a hot source of debate, can now be shown to have retained at least some links with contemporary populations far to the west of its known distribution. This is significant, not least because some scholars identify the immediate source zone for Lapita as having existed somewhere in the islands of Southeast Asia. At the same time, the obsidian quarried by Lapita artisans from Talasea on the Melanesian island of New Britain can be shown to have been among the most far-traded commodities of the Neolithic world.

Commentary: what Lapita is and what Lapita isn't

Antiquity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (240) ◽  
pp. 623-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Terrell
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Early Settlement ◽  
Made In

The essays in this special section on early settlement in Island Southeast Asia may be puzzling to readers of Antiquity who are uninitiated to the ways and concerns of archaeologists working in the Pacific. Some of these authors appear almost reluctant to draw conclusions from the evidence they survey. Others champion their own interpretations unequivocally. What is going on here?It may be, as some say, that academics are by nature a quarrelsome lot. Even so, why is the Lapita cultural complex ‘ever a hot source of debate’ (Bellwood & Koon, above, p. 613)? The essays published here may lack the direct cantankerousness of face-to-face confronat international symposia and professional meetings, but they reinforce the suggestion made in Antiquity a year ago that archaeologists in the Pacific today have come to a crossroads where we often find ourselves talking past each other because we are no longer in general agreement on what is interesting about Pacific prehistory and why (Terrell 1988).

Early farming in Island Southeast Asia: an alternative hypothesis

Antiquity ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (335) ◽  
pp. 250-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Denham
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
Mariana Islands ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Bismarck Archipelago ◽  
Early Farming

Several recent articles in Antiqui (Barker et al. 201 la; Hung et al. 2011; Spriggs 2011), discuss the validity of, and revise, portrayals of an Austronesian farming-language dispersal across Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) during the mid-Holocene (approximately 4000-3000 years ago) . In conventional portrayals of the Austronesian dispersal hypothesis (e.g. Bellwood 1984/85, 1997, 2002, 2005; Diamond 2001; Diamond & Bellwood 2003) , and its Neolithic variant (e.g. Spriggs 2003, 2007), farmer-voyagers migrated out of Taiwan approximately 4500-4000 cal BP to colonise ISEA from 4000 cal BP (Bellwood 2002) and the Mariana Islands and Palau by c. 3500-3400 cal BP (Hung et al. 201 1). The descendants of these voyagers subsequently established the Lapita Cultural Complex in the Bismarck Archipelago by c. 3470-3250 cal BP (Kirch 1997; Spriggs 1997) and became the foundational cultures across most of the Pacific from c. 3250-3100 cal BP (Kirch 2000; Addison & Matisoo-Smith 2010; dates for Lapita in Denham et al. 2012). A major problem with this historical metanarrative is the absence of substantial archaeological evidence for the contemporaneous spread of farming from Taiwan (Bulbeck 2008; Donohue & Denham 2010; Denham 2011 ).

Fataluku

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-425
Author(s):  
Tyler M. Heston ◽  
Stephanie Locke
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
East Timor ◽  
The West ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
West Timor ◽  
Eastern Half

Fataluku ([fataluku], ISO 639-3: ddg) is a language spoken by approximately 37,000 people on the eastern end of Timor-Leste (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016). Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, is an independent nation that occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor in island Southeast Asia, which it shares politically with Indonesia in the west. Timor is located north of Australia, between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Bali in the west and New Guinea in the east.

scholarly journals The first quantitative assessment of radiocarbon chronologies for initial pottery in Island Southeast Asia supports multi-directional Neolithic dispersal

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0251407
Author(s):  
Ethan E. Cochrane ◽  
Timothy M. Rieth ◽  
Darby Filimoehala
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Demographic Expansion ◽  
The West ◽  
Environmental Diversity ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Work Supports ◽  
Neolithic Expansion

Neolithization, or the Holocene demographic expansion of farming populations, accounts for significant changes in human and animal biology, artifacts, languages, and cultures across the earth. For Island Southeast Asia, the orthodox Out of Taiwan hypothesis proposes that Neolithic expansion originated from Taiwan with populations moving south into Island Southeast Asia, while the Western Route Migration hypothesis suggests the earliest farming populations entered from Mainland Southeast Asia in the west. These hypotheses are also linked to competing explanations of the Austronesian expansion, one of the most significant population dispersals in the ancient world that influenced human and environmental diversity from Madagascar to Easter Island and Hawai‘i to New Zealand. The fundamental archaeological test of the Out of Taiwan and Western Route Migration hypotheses is the geographic and chronological distribution of initial pottery assemblages, but these data have never been quantitatively analyzed. Using radiocarbon determinations from 20 archaeological sites, we present a Bayesian chronological analysis of initial pottery deposition in Island Southeast Asia and western Near Oceania. Both site-scale and island-scale Bayesian models were produced in Oxcal using radiocarbon determinations that are most confidently associated with selected target events. Our results indicate multi-directional Neolithic dispersal in Island Southeast Asia, with the earliest pottery contemporaneously deposited in western Borneo and the northern Philippines. This work supports emerging research that identifies separate processes of biological, linguistic, and material culture change in Island Southeast Asia.

‘Strangers’ and ‘stranger-kings’: The sayyid in eighteenth-century maritime Southeast Asia

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 567-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Charismatic Leadership ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
The West ◽  
New Era ◽  
Asian State ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Western Expansion

Sayyidi ‘strangers’ and ‘stranger-kings’, borne on the eighteenth-century wave of Hadhrami migration to the Malay-Indonesian region, boosted indigenous traditions of charismatic leadership at a time of intense political challenge posed by Western expansion. The extemporary credentials and personal talents which made for sāda exceptionalism and lent continuity to Southeast Asian state-making traditions are discussed with particular reference to Perak, Siak and Pontianak. These case studies, representative of discrete sāda responses to specific circumstances, mark them out as lead actors in guiding the transition from ‘the last stand of autonomies’ to a new era of pragmatic collaboration with the West.

The dating of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic: an attempt at chronometric hygiene and linguistic correlation

Antiquity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (240) ◽  
pp. 587-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Spriggs
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Agricultural Crops ◽  
Agricultural Economy ◽  
Island Southeast Asia

As with conventional definitions of the Neolithic anywhere, the concept in this region relies on there being an agricultural economy, the traces of which are largely indirect. These traces are artefacts interpreted as being linked to agriculture, rather than direct finds of agricultural crops, which are rare in Island Southeast Asia. This definition by artefacts is inevitably polythetic, particularly because many of the sites which have been investigated are hardly comparable. We can expect quite different assemblages from open village sites as opposed to special use sites such as burial caves, or frequentation caves that are used occasionally either by agriculturalists while hunting or by gatherer-hunter groups in some form of interaction with near-by agricultural populations. And rarely is a full range of these different classes of sites available in any one area.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document