主讲人简介

Peter Bellwood教授是国际史前考古与人类迁徙研究领域最具影响力的学者之一，澳大利亚国立大学考古学与人类学系荣休教授，澳大利亚人文科学院院士、英国国家学术院通讯院士。他长期从事东南亚与太平洋地区史前考古研究，在东南亚史前文化序列、农业人群扩散以及南岛语族起源与迁徙等领域作出了奠基性贡献，是将东南亚与太平洋考古系统纳入全球人类史前史研究的重要学者。

其研究尤以“农业—语言扩散假说”而闻名，强调农业发展所带来的人口增长与迁徙对于世界主要语系扩散的影响，并长期致力于综合考古学、历史语言学和人类遗传学证据研究史前人群迁徙。出版有First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective ( 2026年修订出版为 First Migrants Revisited: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective )和 First Islanders: Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia等著作，在国际考古学界具有广泛而持久的影响。

讲座摘要

1. Hominin Migrations during the Pleistocene, with Special Reference to East and Southeast Asia

In this first presentation I will focus mainly on the Palaeolithic Era and hominin species in East and Southeast Asia, with particular attention to the evolutionary trajectories of Homo erectus, H. floresiensis, and H. luzonensis. Homo floresiensis, in particular, poses numerous questions about the abilities of tiny hominins to hunt, survive alongside dangerous predators, and exist in isolation on a small island for upwards of one million years. I will then examine the arrival from Africa of the oldest H. sapiens populations in eastern Asia, at an estimated 60–50 kya.

I will also briefly discuss the first modern human migrations beyond the Asian mainland, including movement across the exposed glacial-era subcontinent of Sundaland and then across sea passages to Sahul, the glacial-era landmass that joined Australia and New Guinea (60–50 kya), Japan (40–38 kya), and finally the Americas (16–14 kya).

To finish, I will discuss some interesting pre-farming (pre-Neolithic) archaeological expressions during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene in Southeast Asia and Australia. Some of them, such as the occasional occurrences of backed flakes and microliths, microblades, and bifacial points might indicate contacts with other regions of southern and eastern Asia. The human ability to travel far, especially across the sea, has sometimes perhaps been underestimated.

2. The First Farmers, with Special Reference to East and Southeast Asia, including Western Oceania

The era of global warming after the Last Glacial Maximum, and prior to the Holocene, allowed increases in the population densities and group sizes of hunter-gatherers, especially in regions with strongly seasonal climates and along the coastlines of newly drowned and highly productive continental shelves. By the beginning of the Holocene, around 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in richly resourced regions of eastern Asia, such as the Yellow and Yangtze river basins, were starting to manage their resources through cultivation and husbandry, leading eventually to a growing dependence upon genetically and phenotypically domesticated plant and animal resources that were capable of being transported into new and often unfamiliar environments.

By 8000 BP, domesticated millets, rice, pigs, and dogs were being assembled into food production complexes in central China. By 5000 BP, populations who subsisted from these domesticated resources were in the process of migrating from central China into (a) Mongolia, northeastern China and eastern Russia, and eventually into Korea and Japan, (b) westward towards the Indo-Burmese borderlands, the fringes of the Himalayan Mountains, and the Tibetan Plateau, and (c) into southern China and both Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, plus (eventually) most of Oceania.

The descendants of these Yellow and Yangtze Neolithic agricultural migrants form the majority populations of East and Southeast Asia today. However, they had little to no genetic impact upon the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia, New Guinea, and the Melanesian Islands as far east as Fiji, although cultural impacts, including language change, sometimes occurred. The degree of genetic and cultural continuity in the New Guinea Highlands since the arrival of Homo sapiens around 50,000 years ago has been remarkable, and the New Guinea Highlands had a unique series of developments that led to indigenous tuber and fruit agriculture (without cereals or domesticated animals), apparently with an independent development of polished stone axes. Australia and the interior highlands of New Guinea were therefore relatively unaffected by the Neolithic migrations that passed through Southeast Asia into Oceania, and retained their Late Pleistocene linguistic and genetic roots until the arrival of Europeans.

3. The Transition from Hunter-Gatherers to Farmers in Southeast Asia

In this third talk I will focus on the expansions of agricultural populations from East Asia, especially the Yellow and Yangtze valleys, into the mainland of Southeast Asia. These migrations entered Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and Peninsular Malaysia around 4500-4000 years ago, and involved the movements of the early speakers of Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai languages. These Mainland Southeast Asian Neolithic immigrants introduced rice and millet agriculture with domesticated pigs and dogs, and later domesticated the native junglefowl (chicken).

This period of Southeast Asian prehistory has been the subject of extensive research, especially in Thailand, but I will focus in this talk on results from joint Vietnamese-Australian archaeological projects that illustrate a complex Neolithic migration process. This partly reflected the pre-existing presence in Vietnam and southern China of large Para-Neolithic (late Hoabinhian) hunter-gatherer populations associated with riverine and coastal shell midden formation.

These mid-Holocene shell middens reveal a tradition of tightly bundled and smoke-dried human burial that was associated in many cases with pottery and stone axe usage. Vietnamese assemblages of this type belong to the Da But culture in Thanh Hoa Province and the Quynh Van culture in Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces. In neighbouring Guangxi, many sites have been excavated belonging to the similar Dingsishan culture.

To illustrate Neolithic developments in Vietnam I will focus on a number of recently excavated sites dating from c.4500 BP and onwards in the lower Mekong region, central Vietnam, and the lower Red River Valley. Both rice and foxtail millet starch have been identified on stone tools used for food preparation in some of these sites, associated with nephrite ornaments and richly decorated incised and impressed pottery.

4. The Origins and Migrations of the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples

What linguists today term the Austronesian dispersal has been a topic of great interest throughout the past 250 years, especially amongst European travellers who first recorded with amazement the long-distance voyaging achievements of the Polynesians. By the 1770s, it had already been observed that most Pacific peoples, especially Polynesians and Melanesians, spoke languages with closely related vocabularies. But their physical phenotypes were quite different. Why? those early visitors asked. Today, we think we know the answer, thanks to the endeavors of archaeologists, analysts of ancient DNA, and comparative linguists.

The Austronesian migration ultimately encompassed around 3/4 of the circumference of the earth, from Madagascar in the west to the western coast of South America in the east. It was carried by dugout canoes built up with side planks, outriggers, and sails by people who carried transportable domesticated economies of plants and animals to new and welcoming islands, without prior human populations beyond the Solomons. The Tongan and Samoan islands of western Polynesia were reached around 3000 BP, and then a 2000-year pause occurred until voyagers travelled on to reach the most distant Polynesian islands such as Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand, between 1100 and 700 BP.

In my talk I will highlight, as interesting observations amongst many, the following points:

1. Linguistic reconstructions situate the Proto-Austronesian vocabulary in Taiwan, based on comparisons of existing and historically recorded languages. Prior to arriving in Taiwan ancestral Austronesian societies existed in southern China, but no linguistic traces of this origin remain (except via a possible deep relationship between the Austronesian and Tai-Kadai languages), despite a clear genetic trail leading back towards the Yangtze Basin.

2. Austronesian-speaking populations migrated rapidly between 4200 and 3000 BP, first via the Philippines, then throughout Indonesia and Island Melanesia to reach Tonga and Samoa in West Polynesia. A voyage across 2300 km of open ocean around 3500–3300 BP took them also from the Philippines to the Mariana Islands.

3. After a migration pause in Samoa of about two millennia, the eventual migrations of the Austronesians across the enormous ocean expanses to the east of Tonga and Samoa owed their success to late Holocene sea level stability and the emergence of coral atolls at the ocean surface, as well as perhaps to sheer luck.