An Integrated Perspective On The Austronesian Diaspora: The Switch from Cereal Agriculture to Maritime Foraging in the Colonisation of Island Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper reviews the archaeological evidence for maritime interaction spheres in Island Southeast Asia during the Neolithic and preceding millennia. It accepts that cereal agriculture was well-established in Taiwan during the Neolithic but finds minimal evidence for the transmission of agriculture from Taiwan to Island Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the scholarly dispute in early Austronesian culture history between farming and maritime perspectives is deemed to be based on a vacuous opposition. In terms of a foraging/ farming dichotomy, Austronesians' origins were evidently associated with cereal agriculture in the region of the Taiwan Strait, but their southward expansion was predicated on maritime foraging and trade. Introd uction One of the interests Sandra Bowdler pursued. during the time I was a colleague at the University of Western Australia, was the persistence of the hunter-gatherer economy in the Kimberleys and Arnhem Land despite centuries of visitation by Macassan sea-cucumber collectors. Even though some Aborigines toured Macassar, and witnessed first-hand its agriculturally-based subsistence economy, there was not the slightest tendency for the northern Australian Aboriginal economy to incorporate agricultural practices (Bowdler 2002). My interest looks at this same interaction from an Island Southeast Asian (ISEA) point of view: Why did these visiting Macassans not make some sort of agricultural incursion into northern Australia? Why did they restrict their economic activities in Australia to trade? I see here an ethnohistorical allegory that could clarify poorly-understood aspects of the Austronesian diaspora. Austronesians are defined as people whose first language belongs to the Austronesian family. Most historical linguists assign all the ex-Taiwan Austronesian languages. from Madagascar through ISEA and the Pacific, to a single 'Malayo-Polynesian' branch, ofessentially the same time-depth as the nine branches ofAustronesian restricted to Taiwan (Pawley 2002). The hypothetical, reconstructed ancestor of these indistinguishably deep branches, both ex-Taiwan (descended from proto-Malayo-Polynesian. or PMP) and in Taiwan, is referred to as Proto-Austronesian (PAN). PAN itself would have had an ancestor, which may be labelled pre-Austronesian, distinguishable from PAN by dint of the implausibility of its reconstruction from extant Austronesian languages through standard historical linguistic techniques. While numerous proposals have been published for a deep-seated relationship between Austronesian

Coastal Subsistence, Maritime Trade, and the Colonization of Small Offshore Islands in Eastern African Prehistory

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The Original Banana Split: Multi-disciplinary implications of the generation of African and Pacific Plantains in Island Southeast Asia

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Réseaux néolithiques, nomades marins et marchands dans les petites îles de la Sonde

“…Ces lieux d'Insulinde orientale révèlent des caractéristiques propres à (Cliché : © J.-Ch. Galipaud, IRD, 2011) l'ensemble des îles de l'ASEI et confortent l'hypothèse, formulée par un certain nombre de chercheurs, du développement, pendant cette période, d'une culture maritime partageant des pratiques rituelles et des représentations semblables (Solheim 1980 ;Bulbeck 2008), qui se diffuse largement dans les îles. La datation de certains squelettes dans le cimetière de Pain Haka atteste bien de la présence de sociétés utilisant la poterie, connaissant probablement le tissage et organisées en réseau, mais ces restes humains posent aussi la question de la nature des économies et des systèmes sociaux sous-jacents.…”