Due to their isolation, the Northern Moluccan islands today contain only a very impoverished and mainly marsupial indigenous Wallacean vertebrate fauna that includes the cuscuses Phalanger ornatus and Phalanger alexandriae (Flannery and Boeadi 1995), the sugar glider Petaurus breviceps (not found so far in any archaeological contexts in the Northern Moluccas), and the large placental rodent Rattus morotaiensis (Flannery 1995a). These species have been supplemented by several humanly mediated introductions of placental mammal species, such as Rattus exulans, R. tanezumi, Suncus marinus, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, Cervis timorensis, plus pigs and dogs (Flannery et al. 1995). The 1990s excavations in the Moluccas produced several substantial vertebrate assemblages dating to the late Pleistocene and Holocene. The initial report on the assemblage from Gua Siti Nafisah on Halmahera was published in 1995 (Flannery et al. 1995), in which an extinct wallaby (Dorcopsis sp.) and a bandicoot related to the Echymipera/Rhynchomeles group found in the Holocene deposits of that cave were described as 'quite unexpected', and reported as occurring with the extant Moluccan cuscus species Phalanger ornatus. The opinion was expressed that the two extinct marsupial species were probably 'indigenous elements in the fauna'. The succeeding report (Flannery et al. 1998) announced the further discovery of wallaby bones in Golo Cave and Wetef rockshelter on Gebe, and of Rattus morotaiensis on Morotai. This second report established that the wallaby was not found on Kayoa or Morotai (hence, so far only on Halmahera and Gebe), and that the bandicoot was only found in Gua Siti Nafisah on Halmahera. Further, the main author, Tim Flannery, suggested on the basis of his dental comparisons that the Halmahera and Gebe wallaby species was sufficiently close in its dentition to an extant indigenous wallaby species (Dorcopsis muelleri mysoliae) on Misool Island, southwest of the Bird's Head of Papua, to represent a deliberate human translocation, possibly from there. The absence of this taxon from the modern Northern Moluccan fauna and its apparently abrupt Early Holocene appearance in the archaeological record of Gebe Island thus raised important questions about the origin of this species, the potential timing of its introduction to Gebe, and the reasons for its eventual extinction.

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Music likely played an important role within prehistoric societies but can be challenging to study in the absence of evidence for musical instruments. Here, the authors present two deer antlers recovered from the early Metal Age site of Go O Chua in southern Vietnam. A detailed examination of the artefacts, including evidence for use-wear, combined with insights from ethnographic analogies, leads the authors to conclude that the artefacts were single-stringed musical instruments. At least 2000 years old, the Go O Chua artefacts would be the earliest-known examples of chordophones from the region and indicate a long musical tradition. Their identification gives impetus to archaeo-musicological research in Southeast Asia and beyond.