The Origins and Dispersals of Agricultural Communities in Southeast Asia

Abstract

After 5,000 years ago, the world of the hunter-gatherer economy across Southeast Asia and on the western edge of the Pacific was confronted rather suddenly by another economic system: that of the first agricultural populations. New populations and languages, with close links with contemporary populations in central and southern China, began to spread across the region to form the foundation of the pattern of ethnolinguistic groups which exists today, beneath the veneer of twenty-first-century global civilization. This chapter focuses on the Austronesians and their colonization of Island Southeast Asia and Oceania, since the question of the contemporary Austroasiatic dispersal through the mainland of Southeast Asia is dealt with by Charles Higham. One of the earliest mainstays of the Austronesian economy in Southeast Asia was rice, although this crop was never taken as far as Oceania and many tropical crops such as coconuts, taro, yams and sago were added to the economic plant roster as Austronesians expanded southwards into equatorial regions.

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