Some Final Generalizations
Perhaps I may finally sketch, in brief, some of the major
transformations which I believe prehistoric Austronesian societies underwent in Island
Southeast Asia between about 4000 BC and AD 1.
- 4000-3500 BC; Initial Austronesian expansion to Taiwan; settled cereal and
tuber agriculture, limited seafaring.
- 3000 BC; Proto-Austronesian expansion to the northern Philippines; improvement
of seafaring technology, stylistic shift from cord-marked to plain or red-slipped
pottery.
- Late third and second millennia BC; Proto-Malayo-Polynesian dispersal from the
southern Philippines to Borneo, Sulawesi and the Moluccas; equatorial enhancement of
fruit and tuber production vis-à -vis cereals, except in more
southerly and climatically-seasonal islands such as Java where rice has presumably
always maintained its pre-eminence. One development of great interest which might
have occurred about this time might have been the beginnings of forager adaptations
to the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra (see Sather, this volume).
- Second/first millennia BC? Beginnings of mobile maritime (proto-sea nomad?)
adaptations around the Sulu and Sulawesi Seas (cf. Bellwood 1989 for a maritime
economy with long-distance exchange at Bukit Tengkorak, Sabah, around 1000 BC), and
possibly elsewhere. These, in turn, might have laid some of the seafaring groundwork
for:
- Middle and late second millennium BC; Lapita colonization of Remote Oceania to
as far as Tonga and Samoa. Seafaring skills were here developed further amidst an
ever-expanding vista of uninhabited islands, but with few opportunities to settle on
large western Melanesian islands (especially New Guinea) already inhabited by
Papuan-speaking peoples.
- Second/first millennia BC? Austronesian settlement in Vietnam and Malaya, in
both regions in competition with pre-existing agriculturalists.
- 500 BC and after. Introduction of bronze and iron metallurgy into Island
Southeast Asia. Dong Son drums were also traded from Vietnam into the Sunda islands,
extending from Sumatra to the southern Moluccas.
Perhaps the metallurgical introductions listed last above were no more
than side effects of something much greater; the incorporation of parts of Island
Southeast Asia into a network of Old World trade stretching from the Mediterranean to
eastern Indonesia. Indian pottery of c.200 BC to AD 200 has now been unearthed in Java
and Bali (Ardika and Bellwood 1991), and at the same time the archaeological record
reveals a hitherto-unprecedented level of similarity in local pottery design and
manufacture across a huge region which includes coastal regions of the Sunda islands,
Borneo, Sulawesi and the Philippines. It is possible that a great deal of linguistic
assimilation of prior diversity occurred from this time onwards, for instance by the
Malayic languages (especially Old Malay itself), Javanese and perhaps other languages or
subgroups (cf. Blust 1991 for the possibility of some kind of linguistic levelling in
the Philippines). By AD 500 the Western Austronesian area was perhaps a zone of
continuously-flourishing inter-island travel and trade, with the odd proviso that
Taiwan, where so many crucial developments had once occurred, was now divorced into an
almost total isolation from the rest of Island Southeast Asia (Meacham 1984-5). Such are
the enigmas of history.