The Pottery Trail From Southeast Asia to Remote Oceania

4000 Years of Migration and Cultural Exchange : The Archaeology of the Batanes Islands, Northern Philippines

“…Lanyu Island, Kending in the south, Yuanshan in the north, Yingpu near the west coast), and not Luzon as yet. The Cagayan sites, as well as those in the Mariana Islands and western Melanesia (Lapita), specialized in related but slightly different modes of decoration based on punctate and dentate stamping, with a lesser occurrence of circle stamping that was used mainly for zone boundaries rather than actual motifs Carson et al 2013). Further parallels in baked clay penannular earrings, in Palawan and central and southern (but not northern) Vietnam, are even more interesting.…”

“…Plain red-slipped pottery seems to predate stamped and incised pottery very widely in eastern Island Southeast Asia, and the latter often reverts to plain ware at some point during the Early Metal Phase. A possible exception to this generalisation could be the Cagayan valley on Luzon Carson et al 2013), where the punctate stamped pottery appears to be at the base of the sequence, although this is still a little uncertain. …”

“…The sequence of change in pottery form and decoration presented here for Batanes, covering almost 4000 years, is only matched within the Philippines by the related sequence from the Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon, most recently analysed by Ogawa (2000Ogawa ( , 2002, Mijares (2006) and Hung (2008;Hung et al 2011;Carson et al 2013). Greater understanding of Philippine prehistory from the Neolithic onwards will require a much stronger chronological framework for ceramic change than exists at present, extending through long periods of time and covering different regions of the archipelago.…”

“…Hung et al (2011) argue that these pelagic fish hunting traditions in the Marianas, southern Taiwan, Lanyu and Batanes might be an indication of cultural connections between these localities during the period of initial Austronesian migration beyond Taiwan. Possibly, the ichthyoarchaeological records of southern Taiwan and the Philippines are hinting at the existence of a maritime technology that permitted people to make the 2300 km open-ocean crossing between the Philippines and the Marianas around 3500 years ago (Carson et al 2013). …”

Enter the Ceramic Matrix: Identifying the Nature of the Early Austronesian Settlement in the Cagayan Valley, Philippines

“…From the Philippines one branch of the diaspora appears to have involved a sea crossing of ca. 2,300 km to the Marianas (Hung et al 2011;Carson et al 2013), whilst other human populations dispersed south and southwest across ISEA, with both strands eventually ending up in the Bismarck Archipelago before proceeding on to Near and Far Oceania. The absence of substantial linguistic differentiation suggests the diaspora from the Philippines south and east into ISEA and Oceania was fairly rapid.…”