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Is it possible to correlate the earliest colonizing movements of Austronesian-speaking peoples into Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the myriad islands of Oceania[2] with the existence of a hereditary élite stratum of society? How far back in time can such élites be traced and can their genesis be related in any way to the colonization process itself? And how were the social systems of the earliest Austronesian groups, especially in Melanesia, affected by contact with pre-existing societies, perhaps similar in terms of economy and technology but fundamentally different in terms of social ideology?
The literature on aspects of prehistoric Austronesian social hierarchy is very large,[3] so in this paper I will focus only on three relatively fundamental topics of enquiry. The first is to document available opinion about the prehistory of rank in its various forms in the early centuries of Austronesian expansion, before approximately 3000 years ago. One of my contentions here is that some degree of perspective on the early history of hierarchy, particularly in the Austronesian-speaking parts of Oceania, can be achieved if one discards the engrained habit of regarding “Melanesians” as a single anthropological entity with respect to other Oceanic peoples such as Polynesians. Many other writers share my misgivings about this (e.g. Douglas 1979; Lilley 1986; Thomas 1989), but few have taken what appears to me to be the obvious approach from a historical-linguistic perspective. This is to focus instead on the fundamental differences that divide the societies of the Austronesian- and the Papuan-speaking populations of western Oceania.
The second topic of enquiry revolves around the widespread occurrence of a “founder-focused ideology” in a great many of the ethnographic Austronesian societies of Island Southeast Asia and Oceania. Founders very frequently tend to be revered by their descendants, and one aspect of this ideology in the societies of eastern Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia is that greater status (often of a ritual or sacerdotal nature) is allocated within a community to those who descend from earlier rather than later kin group founders.
The third topic of enquiry follows on from the second. Did the existence of a founder-focused ideology have any influence or causal role in determining the rate and vast extent of Austronesian expansion? To answer this question I focus on “founder rank enhancement”, a process whereby junior founders moving into relative or absolute isolation (such as a new island, previously inhabited or not) could establish senior lines, aggrandize their resources, and attempt to ensure methods of genealogical inheritance which would retain privileges for their descendants. Separation, in short, could have given founders opportunities for aggrandizement of their own and their descendants’ statuses that they might not have had at home. This kind of aggrandizement operated under conditions of foundership in empty territories as well as through successful intrusion by foreigners into existing ruling élites, as seems to have happened occasionally in certain Oceanic islands. In addition, I will suggest that this type of enhancement was correlated in some parts of Austronesia (especially Micronesia and Polynesia) with continuous tendencies through space and time towards a development of greater structural dependence on inherited forms of leadership.