| Abstract: |
One of the most persuasive narratives in recent prehistory has been that of the Austronesian expansion, the notion that migration out of Taiwan some 4000 years ago was responsible for the spread of Austronesian languages from the Philippines to Remote Oceania. Although strongly supported by archaeologists such as Peter Bellwood, many others find the pattern of material culture too diverse to support a demic expansion model. Nonetheless, archaeology has signally failed to establish an alternative model to account for the dominance of Austonesian languages throughout this region. The paper puts forward a hypothesis to account for this. It argues that: (a) Vegeculture existed in much of island Southeast Asia prior to the Austronesian expansion, (b) That the Austronesians, far from being agriculturalists, were fisher-foragers, (c) That the dogs, pigs and chickens supposedly characteristic of this expansion reached island Southeast Asia through alternative routes, (d) That the linguistic reconstructions that appeared to support this model are in fact mosaics of loanwords, (e) That the spread of Austronesian languages was due to a powerful religious / lifestyle ideology which assimilated indigenous speech communities and that this can be detected from material culture.
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