Rainforest Foraging and Farming in Island Southeast Asia. The Archaeology of Niah Caves, Sarawak Volume 1 Edited by GraemeBarker McDonald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, 2013. ISBN: 9781902937540. Pp. xx+410

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 180-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Denham
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Island Southeast Asia

scholarly journals Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (24) ◽  
pp. 6635-6640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Crowther ◽  
Leilani Lucas ◽  
Richard Helm ◽  
Mark Horton ◽  
Ceri Shipton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Genetic Evidence ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Austronesian Language ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
Remote Island ◽  
Material Record

The Austronesian settlement of the remote island of Madagascar remains one of the great puzzles of Indo-Pacific prehistory. Although linguistic, ethnographic, and genetic evidence points clearly to a colonization of Madagascar by Austronesian language-speaking people from Island Southeast Asia, decades of archaeological research have failed to locate evidence for a Southeast Asian signature in the island’s early material record. Here, we present new archaeobotanical data that show that Southeast Asian settlers brought Asian crops with them when they settled in Africa. These crops provide the first, to our knowledge, reliable archaeological window into the Southeast Asian colonization of Madagascar. They additionally suggest that initial Southeast Asian settlement in Africa was not limited to Madagascar, but also extended to the Comoros. Archaeobotanical data may support a model of indirect Austronesian colonization of Madagascar from the Comoros and/or elsewhere in eastern Africa.

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.

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