| Abstract: |
Commencing between 5000 and 4000 years ago, agricultural populations in Taiwan, speakers of early Austronesian languages, began a process of cultural and linguistic expansion that culminated in the widest distribution of any ethnolinguistic population in pre-AD 1500 world history. Austronesian speaking populations ultimately came to settle all of Island Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, the Pacific (except for Australia and much of New Guinea), and Madagascar. The project reported on here is concerned with teasing out the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental backgrounds for the early centuries of Austronesian dispersal in the northern Philippines, specifically in the Batanes Islands, and northern Luzon. A three-phase archaeological sequence covering the past 3500 years for the island of Batan has been established, extending from the Neolithic to the final phase of prehistory (late 17th century). This paper focuses mainly on the Sunget Phase of Batan prehistory (c.1500 to 700 BC), which reveals strong relationships with Taiwan to the north and the Cagayan valley of northern Luzon to the south. Also reported are the preliminary results of palaeoenvironmental research at Paoay Lake, Ilocos Norte (NW Luzon), that document the local development of a deforested landscape since about 3000 BC.
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