SEAArch – The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

Prof Mike Morwood of the Wollongong University is giving this year’s Mulvaney Lecture at the Australian National University. He led the team that was responsible for the discovery of the Indonesian hobbit, or Homo Floresiensis.

2009 Mulvaney Lecture – Hobbits in Context: Hominin Biogeography in Island South East Asia
Lecture Theatre 1, Manning Clark Centre, Building 26a, Union Court
Australian National University, Canberra
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
7.30 pm

Finding evidence for a tiny, new species of human on the island of Flores in Indonesia was unexpected, but no more so than evidence for hominins on the island by 880,000 years ago. This lecture will explain why, with reference to the dispersal and evolutionary histories of other terrestrial animals in island Southeast Asia. It will conclude with some of the implications for early hominin and modern human biogeography in the region.

In what seems to be the first of its kind in Southeast Asia, an ancient road has been discovered in the Hoabinhian site of the Xom Trai Cave dating back to 8,000 – 9,000 years. Sadly, the story on VietNamNet doesn’t display any images of the road, but it indicates the presence of worn-out stones. Remains of an older nearby route, possibly related to the road find, dates even further back.

Ancient road found in cave
VietnamNet Bridge, 26 November 2008
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From the Quaternary Dating Laboratory, Roskilde University, Denmark. The deadine is in two weeks!

Applications are invited for the above Ph.D scholarship, which will be based at the Quaternary Dating Laboratory, Roskilde University, Denmark and affiliated to GESS (the Graduate Programme in Environmental Stress Studies). The scholarship is for a period of 3 years and must be filled as soon as possible (applications required by 15 February 2008). Salary will be around 268,000 Danish kroner per year, before tax and deductions.
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24 October 2007 (Science Daily) – A report on the collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s Ban Chiang Project and Laos’ Department of Museums and Archaeology and the results of the last few year’s work of surveying the area around the Mekong River for archaeological potential.

Filling In The Blanks Of Southeast Asian Prehistory

As archaeologists in the last half century have set about reconstructing the prehistory of Southeast Asia, data from one country—centrally located Laos—was conspicuously missing. Little archaeology has occurred in Laos since before World War II, and beginning in the mid-1970s, Laos shut its doors completely to outside researchers. International scholars had to content themselves with information from excavation and survey work mostly from neighboring Thailand.

That scenario is beginning to shift—and new data, as well as new collaborative relationships—may forever change our perspective on an area that was once considered a “backwater region” of human civilization.

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03 October 2007 (News in Science) – Monash University unveils an interactive map called Sahul Time, named after the ancient landmass of Australia and Papua New Guinea, that shows you the lay of the land at different points in time over the last 100,000 years. While the main focus is of course on Australia, what’s really nifty is the inclusion of much of island Southeast Asia, which would provide anyone with an interest about the prehistory of the region to see how much larger the land mass must have been – and possibly how many archaeological sites now remain underwater. Links in this post will lead to the News in Science article, while a separate link to Sahul Time will be added to the resources page.

Mouse click reveals ancient coastline
Anna Salleh

The changing shape of Australasia can now be seen in a new interactive digital map that mimics the rise and fall of sea levels over the past 100,000 years.

The map also has pop-up images and text about key archaeological sites and possible routes humans took from Asia to Australia during the last ice age.

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20 September 2007 (Smithsonian Institution) – A new study on the wrist bones recovered from the homo floresiensis assembly adds extra weight to our Hobbit from Flores being an entirely new species rather than a sick, deformed human. There are a few other stories popping up today so stay tuned for more insights! It’s a really busy day at work, so hopefully I can post them all up by the end of the day.

Homo Floresiensis skull, creative commons image by SBishop

New Research Sheds Light on “Hobbit” Smithsonian-led Study Published in Science

An international team of researchers led by the Smithsonian Institution has completed a new study on Homo floresiensis, commonly referred to as the “hobbit,” a 3-foot-tall, 18,000-year-old hominin skeleton, discovered four years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. This study offers one of the most striking confirmations of the original interpretation of the hobbit as an island remnant of one of the oldest human migrations to Asia. The research is being published in the Sept. 21 issue of Science.

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The ANU E Press, the digital imprint of the Australian National University is offering a range of scholarly texts from the ANU academic community – for free. These three books in particular are available for download which would be of interest to readers of this site: Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, The Archaeology of the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia, and The Austronesians.

I think it’s really great that texts like these are being released online to reach a wider audience. You’ll need an Adobe PDF reader in order to read the ebooks, but who doesn’t?