Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago

Bibliographic Data

ID2573140
AuthorsWilliam G Solheim (corresponding author), William G Solheim II
Year1987
Volume22
Issue1
Pages181
Publication date1987-03-01
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofPrehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, P Bellwood, 2022
VenueMan (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0025-1496 • E-ISSN: 2397-2548
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2802978
OpenAlexW4229961581
LanguageEN
References cited3

The decision to go ahead with this electronic edition of PIMA 2 was made early in 2007, 10 years after its publication in Honolulu.The book has been out of print for several years, yet no one has written a similar successor, and a readership for its contents still exists; it still scores frequently in citation indices.Furthermore, PIMA 2 presents an overall reconstruction of Indo-Malaysian Prehistory that I am still willing to uphold quite forcefully, despite the need, here and there, for updating and minor modification of opinion.I would therefore like to thank ANU E Press for giving me this opportunity to make this work available again.Two choices were available to me as this edition approached reality.One would have been to prepare a completely new third edition, a PIMA 3, updated throughout.Pressure of other involvements renders this impossible at the moment, and updating a full manuscript of this size would take the best part of a year.I have chosen the easier option, this being to keep the PIMA 2 text in its original form, but to add this short preface in which I refer very briefly to some selected new discoveries and current references.The first such new discovery must, of course, be the remarkable Homo floresiensis, a dwarfed pre-sapient form of humanity that survived with equallydwarfed stegodons on Flores until the end of the Pleistocene, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago; an exciting cave discovery accompanied by plentiful academic intrigue, now described for a general readership by Morwood and van Oosterzee (2007).Although not of central significance for the prehistory of modern humans, the "hobbits" do reflect some interesting potential light on the early movements of extinct hominin species through Asia, possibly as much as 2 million years ago in deep ancestral terms.But how did hobbits and dwarf stegodons manage to survive in Flores for so long, given that modern humans reached Australia long before, by perhaps 50,000 years ago?It is my current (but mutable) opinion that these early modern humans moved through Nusa Tenggara, including Flores, but not Maluku, to their new homes in previously uninhabited Australia and New Guinea.They must have overlapped spatially and chronologically with the hobbits for tens of thousands of years

Ancient history · Archaeology · Archipelago · Geography · Prehistory · Asian Studies and History · Geological and Geophysical Studies · History · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

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