| Abstract: |
Excavations in East Timor over the past four years have produced rich and well-dated cultural assemblages. While this research has extended the known antiquity of occupation in Timor and addressed questions arising from Glover's (1986) seminal work in the 1960s (O'Connor et al. 2002
Spriggs et al. 2003), results of analysis have also forced further questions, particularly regarding the coherence and homogeneity of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic 'complex'
a collection of material items and cultural traits, prime amongst which is pottery, usually argued to accompany the dispersal of Austronesian-speaking agriculturalists and to mark their expansion into Island Southeast Asia. While the diffusionist view of a Neolithic cultural transformation accompanying the appearance of pottery has been challenged as an adequate explanatory mechanism for the inception of the Lapita culture in Island Melansia (eg. Allen 1996, 2000
Allen and Gosden 1996
Green 1991, Terrel 2003), it has generally been accepted rather quietly in Island Southeast Asia. As the corpus of well dated sites within this region expands, the Island Southeast Asian 'Neolithic' complex has been shown to be a chimera
too fragmentary and diverse to be regarded as a cultural entity, too simplistic to explain the diversity and complexity seen in local and regional Holocene records.
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