Introduction
Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) comprises the tropical islands lying in between mainland East Asia and Taiwan to the northwest and Australia and New Guinea to the southeast. The western islands lie on a shallow continental shelf, the Sunda Shelf, and were connected to mainland East Asia during the Pleistocene. The eastern islands that have been separated from the mainland and from each other by deep marine troughs include the Philippines (east of Palawan), Sulawesi, northern Moluccas, and the Nusa Tenggara (“southeast”) islands. Accordingly, human colonization of eastern ISEA, leading to the colonization of Australia and New Guinea (by 50,000 years ago), would have required watercraft capable of transporting groups of people numerous enough to establish viable daughter colonies. All of the large islands and many of the small islands of ISEA were extensively settled by 5000 years ago, on the eve of the Neolithic (Bellwood 1997).
The Holocene climate of ISEA is generally...
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Bulbeck, D. (2014). Island Southeast Asia: Neolithic. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_866
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