Abstract

Despite consensus on the movement of peoples from mainland Asia to Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific over the past five thousand years, the mode of dispersal and biocultural change remains highly contested.

While some hypotheses posit Austronesian-speaking agriculturalists rapidly dispersing via Taiwan, other scenarios postulate, for example, additional dispersal routes, the gradual and uneven adoption of agricultural practices, and dynamic language borrowing.

This talk will introduce current debates on the Austronesian problem, critically synthesising models developed from linguistic, archaeological, and genetic lines of evidence. In addition, it will draw on original fieldwork harnessing archaeological data collected from the Philippines to draw attention to the uneven sampling problem still affecting transdisciplinary studies of the human past in Southeast Asia and Oceania.

Hugo Reyes Centeno is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Kentucky and the current Human Past SCAS Senior Fellow.