Go Back
The Austronesian Expansion. The Austronesian expansion (c. 3000-1000 BC) was the greatest seaborne migration of the prehistoric world, the movement of peoples who carried the Austronesian languages from Taiwan across half the globe. Beginning around 3000 BC, farming peoples crossed from the Asian mainland to Taiwan, where the Austronesian language family has its deepest roots. Over the following two thousand years their descendants moved south through the Philippines and into the islands of Southeast Asia, reaching Borneo, Java, and the coasts of New Guinea.
The migrants were master seafarers. Sailing outrigger canoes across open ocean, they carried with them a whole way of life: domesticated pigs, dogs, and chickens, crops such as taro, yams, and bananas, pottery, and stone tools. By about 1500 BC one branch of these voyagers had reached the Bismarck Archipelago east of New Guinea, where archaeologists recognize them as the makers of Lapita pottery, vessels decorated with intricate stamped designs that have been found across thousands of kilometers of the southwest Pacific.
From the Bismarcks the Lapita people pushed onward into the unknown. In a few centuries they had settled island groups across a vast arc, from New Caledonia and Vanuatu to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, voyaging farther into remote Oceania than any people before them. Much later their descendants would make the final astonishing leaps, reaching Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand, and westward across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar.
The expansion left a single linguistic and cultural inheritance across an oceanic world: today the Austronesian languages, from Malagasy in Madagascar to Hawaiian and Maori in the Pacific, are spoken by some four hundred million people. The Lapita colonization of the Pacific stands as one of humanity's supreme achievements of exploration, accomplished with stone tools, woven sails, and an unmatched knowledge of the sea.
Current Anthropology: Lapita Colonization across the Near/Remote Oceania Boundary
Annual Review of Anthropology: Peopling of the Pacific
ANU Press: The Lapita Culture and Austronesian Prehistory
Science: The Peopling of the Pacific