This volume has been a long time in preparation. As a result, acknowledgement and thanks are due to the patience and forbearance of those contributors who waited for their papers to appear while this volume slowly took shape and then took its place in the queue for publication. A majority of the papers in the volume were initially presented at a conference of the Comparative Austronesian Project. For the organization of that conference and of the project in general, we wish to thank Annegret Schemberg for her efforts and enthusiasm.

The cover of this volume was designed by Bronwyn Dillon of Griffiths & Young Design Pty Ltd. The textile that forms the background is a man’s cloth of the Atoni Pah Meto of west Timor. The ikat centre of this cloth consists of anthropomorphic figures arranged in a succession of sizes, thus forming a kind of ancestral chain. The cloth is composed of a central warp ikat with multicoloured borders of woven cotton thread, each with a supplementary ikat stripe. The photograph on the front cover shows a recitation of origins among the Atoni. This photograph was taken in the central village of the Nabuasa clan in the mountains of southwestern Timor at a ceremony in which a high-ranking member of a branch of the clan, which had migrated from the centre generations earlier, returned to request a recitation of the chant that recounts the origin and migration of the Nabuasa clan. In the photograph, a woman holds a betel nut offering basket to the side of the main chanter. For reproduction of the textile, we wish to thank the National Gallery of Australia and the former curator of Asian textiles, Robyn Maxwell, who now teaches in the Department of Art History at The Australian National University. The photograph is from the private collection of the editor, James J. Fox. Figures and cartography in the volume were done by Robert Nee and Neville Minch of the Cartography Unit of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

As editors, we wish to express our particular thanks to Norma Chin for her considerable and unstinting effort in producing this volume. She has carried out deft copy-editing of individual papers, careful proofreading, the arrangement and formatting of the volume and the exacting preparation of the index. Since she also edited The Austronesians, she has provided vital editorial continuity to the series. We are particularly indebted to her for her skill, efficiency and determination to produce a volume that would be of scholarly value and of general interest.

James J. Fox

Clifford Sather

April 1996