Chronology and colonisation in island Southeast Asia and the Pacific: New data and an evaluation

I have previously examined the dating of the spread of pottery-using, agricultural cultures through Island Southeast Asia and Near Oceania, and their extension, ultimately aceramic, into Remote Oceania1 in three papers, the last co-authored with Atholl Anderson. These sought to provide a critical evaluation of the radiocarbon corpus and its interpretation (Spriggs 1989, 1990, Spriggs and Anderson 1993). Although not as explicitly listed as in the last of these papers, generally similar standards of 'chronometric hygiene' were applied in all three. But in the Island Southeast Asian sample the benefit of the doubt was given more often, because of the comparatively small number of radiocarbon determinations and the lack of detailed reporting of the contexts of a number of them. Results that would have been considered questionable in the East Polynesian context are therefore accepted in the earliest of the papers, and to a lesser extent in the second one.