Raw Material Transport and Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene Maritime Interaction in Southeastern Indonesia and East Timor

Christian Reepmeyer of James Cook University, speaking as a visiting researcher at the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, examines prehistoric maritime interaction and obsidian transport in Island Southeast Asia and East Timor.

The lecture begins with the biogeography of Sunda, Sahul, and the intermediate island zone of Wallacea. Reepmeyer presents computer modelling of inter-island visibility and ocean currents conducted with Shimona Kealy, alongside genetic studies of Indigenous Australian populations and evidence for pelagic fishing at Jerimalai in East Timor c. 42,000 years ago. Because the probability of reaching Sahul by accidental drift was under one percent, he argues that Late Pleistocene populations possessed propelled watercraft and made deliberate crossings.

Reepmeyer then critiques the Austronesian expansion model, which ties the onset of maritime networks to a Neolithic migration from Taiwan around 5000 BP into the western Pacific, represented there by Lapita pottery and West New Britain obsidian in Vanuatu. Pointing to the shift from rice and millet to tuber crops and the lack of archaeological continuity, he argues that exchange networks in Island Southeast Asia began much earlier.

Drawing on excavations with Sue O'Connor at Tron Bon Lei on Alor and Here Sorot Entapa on the small limestone island of Kisar, he presents portable X-ray fluorescence analyses of obsidian assemblages. While a local source on Alor (Group 3) was never exported, a non-local obsidian (Group 1) was transported across East Timor, Kisar, Alor, and Atauro starting c. 15,000 to 14,000 years ago, during the rapid sea-level rise of Meltwater Pulse 1A. Reepmeyer suggests that these networks functioned as a risk-minimisation strategy for communities colonising small, resource-poor islands.