A majority of the papers in this volume were originally presented at a Conference of the Comparative Austronesian Project. We wish to thank all those associated with that Conference, in particular Annegret Schemberg who was in charge of the organization of the Conference and that of the Comparative Austronesian Project in general.

The cover of this volume shows a single-outrigger travelling canoe from Satawal Island in the Caroline Islands of the Federated States of Micronesia. It is taken from François Edmund Pâris’s Essai sur la Construction Navale des Peuples Extra-Européens, Plate 107. Paris: Bertrand, 1841. We are grateful to Adrian Horridge for the use of his copy of this print. The textile that forms the background for the cover comes from Kosrae Island, also in Micronesia. It is a belt of vegetable fibres consisting of knotted multi-coloured warp threads combined with supplementary weft weaving. For the reproduction of this textile, we wish to thank the National Gallery of Australia and the former curator of Asian textiles, Robyn Maxwell, who now teaches at The Australian National University. The design of the cover is by Bronwyn Dillon of Griffiths & Young Design Pty Ltd. The drawings and cartography in the volume have been done by Theo Baumann and Jenny Sheehan of the Cartography Laboratory of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

Putting together a volume of this sort with three editors and twenty contributors is by no means an easy task. All of the careful and considered copyediting of individual contributions, the proof-reading of these papers and the preparation of the index for this volume have been done by Norma Chin to whom we wish to express our particular thanks. It would be hard to imagine a more able and more effective person with whom to work on the production of a complex collection of papers.

Peter Bellwood
James J. Fox
Darrell Tryon
April 1995