Layers of Discovery

Abstract

Millennia before the first European ship was sponsored to find a passage to the Orient, in an era when Homer was composing his first great works in the Mediterranean and iron was spreading across Europe, one of the most expansive and fascinating migrations of all time began. Groups of people left their ancestral home in island Southeast Asia for new lands to the East. Their subsequent discoveries, innovations and successes in colonising the available land on over one third of the globe has been called "one of the greatest sagas of world prehistory". Their eventual territory covered an area of the globe roughly equivalent to the better part of Europe and Asia combined. It was a "diaspora that is without parallel in human history until the spread of Indo-European languages from western Europe over the world began in the sixteenth century". The nature of island environments, and the interaction between them, is unique and allows for studies of social and cultural evolution that can be easily blurred in a continental setting. This has allowed the sourcing of artifacts, studies of linguistics, genetics and relationships between domesticated plants and animals to enhance traditional archaeological studies. This story, therefore, is more than an account of prehistoric discovery, adaptation and invention. It is also a story of modern scientific discovery where researchers from a variety of disciplines have come together to rediscover the history of Oceania and its earliest inhabitants.