Austronesians Expansion

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Archaeology and the Austronesianexpansion: where are we now?Matthew Spriggs*

For many years the author has been trackingthe spread of the Neolithic of Island SoutheastAsia (ISEA) and its extension eastwards intothe w estern Pacific, as a proxy for dating thespread of the Austronesian (AN) languagesacross that same vast area. H ere he recallsthe evidence, upda tes the hypothesis and posessome new questions.

Keywords: Island Southeast Asia, Neolithic, Austronesian languages, LapitaAbbreviations: ISEA Island Southeast Asia; AN Austronesian; PAN Proto-Austronesian;PMP Proto-Malayo-Polynesian; EMP Eastern Malayo-Polynesian; PO Proto-Oceanic; NGNew Guinea.

IntroductionMy own particular inspiration for embarking on an examination of the ISEA and Pacificradiocarbon corpus in the late 1980s was threefold. Perhaps most directly it came from anarticle by Ellen and Glover (1974) on pottery production and trade in eastern Indonesia,where Glover presented what dates were then available for the Neolithic spread acrossISEA and into the western Pacific. Another inspiration was Higham's attempt at what hascome to be known as 'chronometric hygiene' Wilfred Shawcross' marvellous ad-libbedterm adopted by me in 1989 in trying to bring some order to disordered mainlandSoutheast Asian sequences for the beginnings of bronze use (Higham 1983, 1996/7 [first* School ofArchaeology an d Anthropology, Building 14, A.D. Hope Building, The Australian NationalUniversity, ACT0200, Australia (Email: [email protected])


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Matthew Spriggspub. 1988 ]). Finally, in most people's mind s the link between t he spread of A N languagesand that of the Neolithic across ISEA is particularly associated with Peter Bellwood and hismajor syntheses starting from Man s conquest of the Pacific (1978) to Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian archipelago (198 5; second edition 1997). T he latter of these works was indeed ano ther inspira tion. M y initial pub lished reaction (Spriggs 1989) to the first edition was that the volume did not discuss the min utiae of the radiocarbon dates i t was und erp inne d by which left on e som ew hat unsatisfied. Th ere was certainly a need for a critical exam ination of the ISEA radiocarbon corpus by the end of the 1980s as new dates became available. One ofmy pap ers explicitly considered change s in the 1997 , second editio n, of Bellwood'sPrehistoryof the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in relation to the latest radiocarbon dates available (Spriggs1999; see also Spriggs 1996a, 1998, 2000, 2001). A subsequent paper gave a full listing ofall pertinent dates in ISEA and Near Oceania (Spriggs 2003), and was itself updated fouryears later (Spriggs 2007a).

I return to the them e of these papers here, not to give a fiirther u pd ate (see Spriggs 20 10 ),but to consider some of the important issues that have come up over the last 20 years inrelation to the nature of the expansion of the ISEA Neolithic and the link between it andthe spread of AN languages across the region. These issues include: the fall-out from thecollapse of the consensus mod el of ISEA AN subgro uping; the question of one Neo lithic ormultiple 'Neolithics' in ISEA; the early spread of domesticated plants westward into ISEAfrom the New Guinea centre of agriculture; the question of whether there was a Neolithiccultural 'package' that spread along with the AN languages and whether we are comparingthe right sites in examining the AN spread (for sites mentioned see Figure 1).

Blust's subgrouping model challengedThe most important development has been the collapse in acceptance of Blust's 1970s and1980s model of AN subgrouping in ISEA, adopted by many archaeologists for decades as thelast word on the subject (Blust 1976, 1978 , 1982 , 198 8). Linguists such as Mark D on oh ueand others have launched major assaults on the model in recent years, proposing a trajectoryfrom Proto-Austronesian to Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) to Eastern Malayo-Polynesian(EMP) to Proto-Oceanic (PO) (Donohue & Grimes 2008; Klamer et ai 2008 ; Donohue& Denham 2010; see Figure 2).

We can use the spread of the ISEA Neolithic as a proxy for AN language spread, asjustified at length by Pawley (2004) and Ross (2008), among others. In doing this, it is veryhard to see anything between PMP and EMP at all from the archaeology. It would seemthat movements out of Taiwan were rapid after about 4000 BP and by 3800 BP dialects ofPMP were spoken everywhere from the Philippines to eastern Borneo, Sulawesi and southto East Timor, spreading with the first pottery-using cultures in those areas. Currently thedates for the EMP area in northern Maluku do seem to reflect a later time of spread, atabout 3500 BP as with Palau and the Marianas and Java. This could conceivably have beena pause related to a shift from rice and millet to predominately New Guinea-derived root


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Archaeology and the Austronesian exp ansion

kilometresO Cartography-GIS A NU.10-091/JS

/ . Island Southeast Asian Neolithic sites mentioned in this paper

Track forward to about 3350-3300 BP on the current radiocarbon chronology and wehave the earliest Lapita sites in the Oceanic AN 'homeland' of the Bismarck Archipelago asthe eastwards push of the ISEA Neo lithic (Sum merha yes 20 07 ). Th is is rather d isingenuotislydiscussed as 'the spread of Lapita pottery' by Torrence and Swadling (2008: 600), as if wewere talking of an isolated innovation rather than the spread of a much broader culturalcomplex. Even with the pottery, we are talking of a distinctive design system, specialisedvessel forms and particular surface treatments, not just the idea of pottery in general. Inaddition, Petrequin and Petrequin (1999) have argued, given the particular manufacturingtechniques of Lapita pottery, that potters themselves must have migrated from ISEA to the


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Matthew SprigsProto Austronesian

Formosan language groups(nine groups)

Malayo-Polynesian (MP)ProtoCentral/Eastern MP

Western Malayo-Po lynes ianlang ua ge gr ou ps Central MP Eastern MP ??)(20 -25 gro up s? ) linkage

(Proto

Proto S. Halmahera/W New GuineaB Proto Austronesian Proto Oceanic

(9 Formosan groups) Proto Malayo-Polynesian

(30-40 northern and southern groups) Eastern M-P

South Halmahera Proto OceanicWest-New-Guinea

Figure 2. A) Blust's subgrouping of AN languages; B) a revised phytogeny (combinedfigure courtesy ofMark Donohue).

The spread of Neolithic AN-speaking cultures across much of ISEA is a similarphenom enon , in terms ol its rapidity, to the Lapita expansion beyond the BismarckArchipelago between about 3100 and 2900 BP when that culture spread beyond NearOceania through the south-east Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fij i and into westernPolynesia. The distinction between N ear and R emo te Oceania was first made by Pawley andGreen (1973). Near Oceania refers to New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the main


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Archaeology and the Austronesian expansionof Micronesia and Polynesia, which was first occupied only about 3500 BP in the case ofthe Marianas and possibly Palau, and not long after about 3100 BP for the rest of IslandMelanesia and western Polynesia.

Ab and onin g the straitjacket of an outm od ed way of looking at the linguistic subg roup ingof Malayo-Polynesian languages frees up both linguists and archaeologists to look at moreinreresting cultural processes: Donohue and Denham's (2010) paper is a notable example.But if PMP was spoken over much of ISEA, then we may not be able to show linguisticallywhere N ew Gu inea crops were adopted, as very early borrowings will be undetec table. On lyarchaeological evidence will be pertinent to this issue.

Very closely related dialects of Proto-Oceanic AN were clearly spoken around 3100-2900 BP from the Bismarcks to Tonga and Samoa; the spread was so rapid that it canhardly be otherwise (Spriggs 2007b). The subsequent differentiation between its constituentsubgroups developed once levels of inter-archipelago mobility decreased in succeedingcenturies.

One Neolithic or two?Bellwood (2005: 6, 2006: 63, fn. 2) seems more recently to have abandoned his ideas ona potentially earlier pre-Austronesian Neolithic spread associated with cord-marked potteryand enc ompassing western Borne o, Sumatra and pa rts of Java (1997 : 23 7- 8) . But i t may bethat he was right first time. There is potentially a major input from the spread of Neolithiccultures, seemingly associated with Austro-Asiatic speaking groups, down through the MalayPeninsula and into ISEA. This is particularly clear in both Sumatra and western Borneo(Sim anjun tak & Forestier 20 04 ; Gu illaud 2 00 6). Java seems to show different p attern s indifferent areas: with Red-slipped pottery and more AN-looking cultures in some parts, andassemblages with clearer links to Sum atra in othe rs (Bellwood 199 7: 2312). H ow far to th eeast and so uth-east this influence goes is ano ther q uestion for research (cf. An derson 20 05 ).

The current form of the domestic pig that spread out into the Pacific would seem to derivefrom mainland Southeast Asia rather than from any movement south from Taiwan (Larsonet al. 2007), so some cross-over must have taken place prior to the Neolithic settlement ofnorth ern M aluku at abou t 350 0 BP. Dom estic pigs in the northern Philippines' N eolithicsite of Nagsabaran, however, came from Taiwan, and the situation in Borneo and Sulawesiis unclea r (Piper etal. 2009). There is at present little evidence of further crossover betweenthe two Neolithics beyond Pacific clade pigs. The claim that chickens having followed asimilar route (Dobney etal. 2008: 69, after Liu etal. 200 6) is on hold because of a generallack of direct archaeological evidence across ISEA (Storey etal. 20 10 ). Pigs, chicken s, a smallrat species {Rattus exulans) and (probably) the dog all spread from ISEA into the westernPacific at the start of the Lapita phase, and so clearly accompany the Neolithic expansion(Spriggs 1996b).

New Guinea and influences from the east


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Matthew Sprigsg e n e t i c d a ta , fo r a s ig n i fi c a n t we s tw a r d e x p a n s io n o f N e w G u in e a a r e a {sensu lato) p l a n td o m e s t i c a te s b e f o r e th e s p r e a d o f p o t t e r y - u s in g c u l tu r e s a c r os s I SEA ( Le b o t 1 9 9 9 ; D e n h a metal. 2 0 0 3 , 2 0 0 4 ; A l l ab y 2 0 0 7 ; K e n n e d y 2 0 0 8 ; D e n h a m & D o n o h u e 2 0 0 9 ) . H o w f ar w e s ta n d n o r th th i s s p r e a d g o es is c l ea r ly a ma jo r to p ic fo r c o n t in u e d in v e s t ig a t io n . O n e n o te sth a t a w o r d f or s u g a r c a n e ( o n e o f th e N G d o m e s t i c a te s ) o c c u r s in PA N ( Blu st 1 9 7 6 ) , s p o k e n in Ta iwan before the spread of po t te ry-us ing cu l tu res ac ross ISEA. Ei ther th is r e f lec ts a verye a rly s p r e a d n o r th ( D o n o h u e & D e n h a m 2 0 1 0 : 2 3 6 ) , o r th e t e r m r e f er re d o r ig in a l ly inT a i w a n t o a n o t h e r Saccharum s p e c ie s ( Da n ie l s & Da n ie l s 1 9 9 3 ) .

Sulawes i has been h e ld u p as sho w ing l ing uis t ic and a rchaeolog ica l s igns of be ing a keya r e a o f p o te n t i a l h y b r id i ty b e twe e n n o r t h e r n Ta iwa n - d e r iv e d p a t t e r n s o f Ne o l i th ic c u l tu r ea n d th o s e c o min g f r o m th e Ne w Gu in e a a r e a to th e e a s t o r in d ig e n o u s to th e i s l a n d i t s e l f( Bu lb e c k et al. 2 0 0 0 ; S p r i g g s 2 0 0 3 : 6 5 ; H a k i m et al. 2 0 0 9 ) . A lo t mo r e a r c h a e o lo g y h a sbeen u nd er t ak en o n Sulawes i , co m pa red to ad jacen t a reas , and so i t s sa l ience may, howev er ,b e s o me wh a t e x a g g e r a te d in o u r p r e s e n t s t a t e o f k n o wle d g e . S in c e a r c h a e o lo g ic a l r e s e a r c hr e c o m m e n c e d in Ea s t T im o r f r o m 2 0 0 0 , it h a s al s o a p p e a r e d a s a k e y a r ea in s u c h d i s c u s s io n s( O ' G o n n o r 2 0 0 6 ) .

IThe Austronesian and Neolithic 'package'So where does this leave the supposed AN -Ne olithic 'package' as enum erated by Bellwoodand others? As we have more information on all aspects of the material culture of the timeperiod in question, the picture inevitably becomes more complex. Bulbeck, O'Gonnor andothers have rightly poin ted ou t some aspects of co ntin uity in areas such as Sulawesi and EastTimor in fiaked stone technology, simple shell beads and fishhooks, and the use of the earthoven (Bulbeck etal. 2000; Szabo & O 'Gon nor 2004; O 'Gon nor 6 Veth 2005 ; O 'Go nno r2006 ) . There are also earlier Tridacna shell adzes but these are either of a different stylethan those associated with the Neolithic spread out into the Pacific (Bellwood 1997: pi.25) or are surface finds possibly made from fossil shell (O'Gonnor 2006). Gomparison isnot helped by both taphonomic processes, whereby shell appears not to survive at some keysites, and rather confused claims in the literature: the 'large numb ers o f shell artefacts whichare common in Lapita contexts.. .recovered from early Holocene assemblages in East Timor'(Anderson & O'Gonnor 2008: 4) refers to numbers of artefacts, not to artefact types, whichonly incontestably include shell beads and fishhooks. In ISEA only three at most of out ofthe ten shell ornament types found in Lapita sites in the western Pacific (see Kirch 1988)occur in pre-NeoIithic contexts. Two of these represent shell bead types that are themselvesvery variable with in ISEA and wh ich are generally m ade on different shell species (Szabo &O ' G o n n o r 2 0 0 4 : 6 2 3 ^ ) .

Shell ornament types found in Taiwanese Neolithic sites are missing from early Neolithiclevels in the G agayan Valley sites of no rth ern Luzo n a nd in the Karam a River sites on Sulawesi(See Figure 1 for the locations of ISEA Neolithic sites me ntion ed in this pap er). This maybe attributed to marine shellfish not being readily available in these inland locations (Hung2008 : 225) .


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Figure 3. Dentate-stamped, flat-bottomed dish from Nagsabaran, Cagayan, northern Luzon, Philippines (photographcourtesy ofHsiao-chun Hung).

Luzon over its rapid development in the Bismarcks to become the classic design system ofLapita (Hung 2008; see Figure 3 for an example). Spindle whorls, and therefore a particulartechnology of weaving, can also now be established as having a Taiwanese origin in ISEAand having spread over much of the region (Cameron 2002). Recently, the Teouma Lapitacemetery site on Efate Island in Vanuatu has provided evidence for the earliest jar burialsin the Pacific at abo ut 3 00 0 BP, again harking back to conte mp ora ry and earlier N eolithicpractices in more northern parts of ISEA such as Borneo and Taiwan (Bedford etal. 2 0 0 6 ;Bedford & Spriggs 2007).

There is also a point made long ago: just because there is evidence of shell fishhooks,for instance, in pre-Neolithic contexts in places stich as East Timor, this is only necessarilysignificant if there were no such items in early Taiwanese or north ern Philippines assemblages(Spriggs 1996b). If they were also found there and they were then the Timor evidencedoes not negate them being part of an AN-associated Neolithic 'package'. Achugao in theMarianas (Butler 1994) and Neolithic sites in northern Luzon do have such fishhooks


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Matthew Spriggsthese issues quite adequately not just in the case of Lapita where he applied it, but backto the west in ISEA as well (Green 1991, 2000).

Some writers seem to expect to see a monothetic Neolithic 'package' (in Glarke's [1968:37] terms) with all artefact types occurring at all sites. Galls are made to throw out the modelentirely when a particular claimed item is found in pre-Neolithic contexts. De nha m (200 4:616) seems to take this line, based on 'processual and factual deflcienciei with the typesof models that accompany delineation of such packages. A distinctively polythetic set ofartefacts and practices should be expected, however, for a colonising group moving throughvaried environm ents with chan ging resources, and enco untering a variety of/K situ cultureswith their own effective adaptations to 'place'. The Indonesian scholar Daud Tanudirjo(2006: 86, citing Robertson 1992), similarly using Glarke's (1968) terms, has noted thepolythetic nature of 'glocal' (globalised-localised) cultures, such as we would expect fromsuch encounters. Dewar (2003) has pointed out how rice agriculture would have beenincreasingly difficult as peop le moved from the tempe rate env ironm ents of Taiwan thr ou ghthe Philippines to the equatorial wet tropics of eastern ISEA and out into the Pacific. Theadoption of root and tree crops of New Guinea origin is thus not surprising in easternISEA. The lack of easy access to marine shells for ornament manufacture in inland areasof Luzon and Sulawesi has already been mentioned. Substitutes in clay and stone weremade in Luzon, but the technology clearly continued to spread in coastal areas: thus wefind Tridacna shell adzes oi: Ne olithic type reap pearing in Bukit Teng korak and East Tim or(Glover 1986: 117; Bellwood & Koon 1989: 618) and then in Lapita. Distinctive shellornaments such as Gonus rings have been fotmd on Palawan at Leta Leta (S2abo & Ramirez2009), at Krai near Surakarta on Java (van Heekeren 1972: 164, pi. 88), at Uattamdion Kayoa near Halmahera and in the earliest Marianas and Lapita si tes (Hung 2008:222 ) . jAre we comparing the right sites in ISEA?The spread of Lapita culture beyond Near Oceania took place within about 200 yearsbetween 3 10 0 and 2 900 BP. Th ere are over 120 Lapita open se ttleme nt sites between3100 and 2800/2700 BP in Remote Oceania that document this spread (Andersonet al 2001; Bedford & Sand 2007: 9-10). This contrasts with the si tuation in ISEAbeyond Taiwan and the Gagayan Valley in northern Luzon. In much of the region wehave generally fragmentary and poorly-dated Neolithic assemblages, often considerablydisturbed, and covering a nearly 2000-year t ime-span between 4000 and 2300/2100BP (Bellwood 1997: 219-34). The majority are cave sites, and if we exclude the 20+dated cave and shelter sites with Neolithic deposits, the number of open settlementsites reported for this period which have been radiocarbon dated to before 3000 BPtotals less than 20 for the whole of ISEA outside of Taiwan (Table 1). The same pointhas been made previously by Anderson and O'Gonnor (2008: 2), but their claim that''virtually all o f the early pottery sites investigated in ISEA are caves or shelters' is clearlyan exaggeration. It remains the case, however, that the universe of sites that are being


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Matthew SpriggsA 4000 BP pottery assemblage in Luzon may not be direcdy comparable to a 3500 BP

assemblage in Sulawesi or the Marianas, or a 3000 BP assemblage in Sabah. When they arevery similar that is all to the good, but if they are not then we should not be too surprised.There is a desperate need for closed assemblages of comparable ages as the comparisonsample in ISEA as we have with Lapita. Such sites are extremely scarce in this region atpresent.

We can take central Vanuatu in the western Pacific as an example where the culturalsequences are well established (Bedford 2006, 2009). It is clear from there that 3000 BPLapita cultural assemblages are very different from their successor Late or post-Lapita onesat 2750 BP and even further removed from those of 2500 or 2000 BP Indeed, in the 1960swhen the full cultural sequences had not been fleshed out, it was believed that Lapita (c .3050-2800 BP) and the Early Mangaasi (2300-1800/1600 BP) culture assemblages foundin central Vanuatu represented separate migrations of distinct populations (Garanger 1972).With well-dated assemblages filling in the gaps between them we can now see a continuousdevelopment in pottery style and material culture deriving one from the other. The twostylistically very distinct assemblages of Lapita and Mangaasi are separated by a minimumof only 500 years.

Th is suggests that, bey ond perha ps being able to establish the earliest dates for po ttery at aregional level, we may have a hard job establishing co nne ctions betwee n c ultural assemblagesseparated in time by more than a few hundred years in ISEA. Given this, the occasional'Lapita-like' sherds in ISEA sites may be mo re significant than first appears; heirloom s fromor remnants of assemblages that would have been more widespread and homogeneous inthe initial Neolithic of 4000-3800 BP Outside northern Luzon where such assemblagesare reasonably common (Figure 3), we have such sherds from sites such as: the BatunganGaves on Masbate in the Philippines (Solheim 1968: 28, 56); Bukit Pantaraan on Sulawesi(Anggraeni/in. comm. 2010; see Figure 4); Bukit Tengkorak in Sabah on Borneo (Bellwood& Koon 1989: 617; Ghia 2003 : 92 , 95) and on Pulau Ay in the Banda Gr oup (Lape 2000a:226, 2000b: 141). Bellwood (2004: 31) provides a useful photograph of several relevantsherds.

T he curre nt state of our kno wledge of the early N eolithic of ISEA is sparse: it is as if 195of the 200 or so Lapita sites remain unloc ated. W e wo uld be co mp aring the five located ones all from a restricted 'homeland' area with a handful of sites over a much larger areathat date 3 00 -6 00 years later. An d from this sample we wou ld be hop ing to say som ethingabout initial Lapita spread. Recall too that more than 90 per cent of Lapita sites are opensettlements where a wide range of activities took place, whereas more than 50 per cent ofISEA dated Neolithic assemblages come from caves and rockshelters that are not likely tohave formed similar settlement foci; they most probably represent short-term transit stopsor special use sites, such as cemeteries.

The furphy {rumoux Aus.) of pre-Lapita pottery, betel nuts and pigs in New Guinea (seecriticism in Spriggs 199 6b, 200 1) is now nearly laid to rest, w ith a major p aper by O 'G on no ret al. (in press) critiquing the case for northern New Guinea early pigs and pots. Directdatin g of the supposed early betel nut (clearly a Southea st Asian-derived dom esticate) from


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Figure 4. A sherd with Lapita-like decoration, dentate-stamping with white inflll, found by Anggraeni on the surface of thesouthern slope of the Bukit Pantaraan 1 site, Tamemongga vilLige, Mamuju Region, west Sulawesi, Indonesia (L 39.68mW: 29.88mm; photograph courtesy of Anggraeni).

DiscussionIn discussing cultures in northern and central Europe of different periods, Vandkilde(2007: 16-17) has very usefully drawn attention to 'macro-regional phases of conjuncture'in which 'the social climate ap pears "extra hot", foreign impubes are actively and creativelyincorporated, and identities rapidly and profoundly change'. Such a 'macroregional phase ofconjuncture' is surely what we are witnessing with the start of the Neolithic of ISEA.Tanudirjo (2006: 84-6) specifically sees the process as akin to globalisation in the modernworld.

If we look at the ISEA Neolithic like this, we focus on the cultural implications of the


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Matthew Spriggsincreasingly critical the further east they spread. But subsistence changes were not needed tochang e identities. It was the possibilities open ed up by a suite of new ideas and artefacts thatwere key the real Neolithic 'package' or process of 'Neolithisation' did not necessarilyinvolve agriculture at all. But it certainly did involve pottery, its complex vessel forms andsurface finish surely betokening new social relations; it certainly did involve a suite of shellartefacts with equally novel meanings, and also new technologies of cloth and barkcloth.Jul ian Thomas ( 1997: 59) has put it succinctly: 'material things did not attend the Neolithic,they were the Neolithic'.

One participated in this new world by speaking the new (Austronesian) language. Inparticular cases this may well have been affected by substratal influence from older locallanguages when adopted in situ (Donohue & Denham 2010: 231). Some scholars suggestthat nothing much changed across the Neolithic boundary and that those who think itdid have constructed 'a mirage of isolation' (Denham 2004: 613) to characterise earlierperiods. But they support this contention by stringing together every piece of evidence ofpre-Neolithic interaction in the region over a period of 6000 or more years and putting iton a map as being somehow equivalent to the 'hot' period of a few centuries that is beingdiscussed here (Bulbeck 2008; Torrence & Swadling 2008). There are sampling problemswith the early Neolithic 'signal' as discussed earlier, but they are as noth ing c om pare d to thecollapsing of thousands of years of process to produce static representations of long-livedartefact classes. These do not represent an operating exchange system on the eve of thespread of the ISEA Neolithic, but produce merely a palimpsest, or a 'mirage of interaction'if you like.Roger Green's (1991 , 2000) model of intrusion, integration and innovation captures thesituation well in ISEA as well as the western Pacific, whether we are talking of materialculture, language or people. There was indeed some migration out of Taiwan (Kayseret al. 2008); there was mass recruitment of people from populations already resident inISEA and Near Oceania as the Neolithic spread (Soares etal. 2011); artefacts and practiceswere integrated from already-resident groups and others were discarded by them; newideas were brought into being as unexpected human and environmental situations wereencountered. And then at the end of the main Solomons, the participants in this processjum ped off the inhabited world into a world nobody had ever seen, and beyond it, in RemoteOceania, it was all new and it was all migration. That too must have led to further changes,further inventions of social relations. The se true pione ers were con strained only by the needto maintain links back to proximate 'homelands' to ensure demographic balance, whetherin rhe Bismarck Archipelago or in major staging posts further east, such as the Reefs-SantaGruz Islands between the Solomons and Vanuatu (Kirch 1988: 113-14).

The ongoing debates about the meaning of the ISEA Neolithic and the Lapita culturehave come from the fact that we are struggling to find appropriate models to deal with justwh at happ ens du ring such tem poral 'h ot spo ts'. Th is is just as true in Europe with debatesover the meaning of cultural forms such as the Battle Axe culture. Bell Beakers, the EarlyBronze Age, the Tum ulus an d U rnfield cultures, or H allstatt and La T ne (Vandkilde 2 007 ).For ISEA I have previously suggested elite dominance as the explanatory model (Spriggs


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Matthew Spriggs- 1997. Prehistory of the ndo-Malaysian archipelago.

Honolulu (HI): Univetsity of Hawai'i Press.- 2004. The origins anddispetsals of agticultutalcommunities in Southeast Asia, in I. Glover & P.

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P. Jian-guo (ed.) Th e archaeology of south-east coastalislands of China Conference: 1-22. Taipei: ExecutiveYuan, Council for Cultural Affairs.- 2006. The early movements of Austronesian-speakingpeoples in the Indonesian region, in T.Simanjuntak, I.H.E. Pojoh & M. Hisyam (ed.)Austronesian diaspora and the etbnogenesis of people

in Indonesian archipelago: 61 -82 . Jakarta:Indonesian Institute of Science.BELLWOOD, P &E. D izoN. 2005. The BatanesArchaeological Project and the out of laiwanhypothesis for Austronesian d ispersal, y /Austronesian Studies 1(1): 133.

BF.L1.WOOD, P & P K O O N . 1989. 'Lapita colonists leaveboats unburned!' Th e question of Lapita links withIsland Southeast Asia. Antiquity 63 : 6 1 3 - 2 2 .

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