Introduction: 'Austronesia' and the great Austronesian migration (original) (raw)

during the late Holocene is changing continually and no more so than in thinking about issues of migration and colonization. These can be regarded as the mobile and relatively sessile phases respectively of initial or later human settlement in oceanic landscapes. The Indo-Pacific region comprises Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), Australia, and the Oceanic islands, to which are added the remote outlier of Madagascar. In Indo-Pacific prehistory, especially within the last 5000 years, the movement of populations by voyaging, coastally and across sea-gaps of up to several thousand kilometers, is perhaps the most notable feature and the most influential in shaping the geography of human prehistory. The repeated creation and development of new societies and interactive networks, the introduction of plants, animals, and productive systems, the advent of new technologies, and the anthropogenic impact upon island environments are integrally related consequences of maritime colonization. Areas of particular interest in terms of migration and colonization during the late Holocene are ISEA and Remote Oceania, which are seen as closely connected by the expansion of Austronesian-speaking populations. The Austronesian connection, however, has been established more convincingly in linguistic and genetic propositions than by archaeological field research and analyses. In part, that is simply because inferences about origin are obtained more readily from language and molecular biology than from material culture or other archaeological remains, but differences in approach between the regions have also frustrated the articulation of ISEA and Oceanic archaeologies. For example, virtually all of the early pottery sites investigated in ISEA are caves or shelters and on sampling grounds alone they provide a debatable basis of comparison with Lapita open sites farther east. In addition, while the late Holocene prehistory of Remote Oceania concerns human migration to, and colonization of, islands that hitherto had seen no human settlement, ancient and still-occupied anthropogenic landscapes of much larger and more diverse islands provided the setting for late Holocene prehistory in ISEA and Near Oceania. Initial colonization of these was much more remote in time and circumstance. In this Introduction we comment on issues