The Niah Caves in Chronological Context: Review of Barker Graeme (editor), Rainforest Foraging and Farming in Island Southeast Asia. 2013. Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research; ISBN: 978-1-902937-54-0; xx+410 pages, with 279 illustrations and 60 tables. £62.00 (hardback); and Barker Graeme and Farr Lucy (editors), Archaeological Investigations in the Niah Caves, Sarawak. 2016. Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research; ISBN: 978-1-902937-60-1; xxx+562 pages, with 298 illustrations, 115 tables, and a CD-ROM (with an additional xv+339 pages, 76 illustrations and 82 tables). £65.00 (hardback).

Radiocarbon ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. iii-vi
2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (24) ◽  
pp. 6635-6640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Crowther ◽  
Leilani Lucas ◽  
Richard Helm ◽  
Mark Horton ◽  
Ceri Shipton ◽  
...  

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.


Antiquity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (240) ◽  
pp. 587-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Spriggs

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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