The Indonesian–Australian Archaeological Research Project in the Northern Moluccas

The Indonesian–Australian Archaeological Research Project in the Northern Moluccas (the Indonesian Province of Maluku Utara), undertaken between 1990 and 1996, illuminated 40,000 years of prehistory in a biogeographical region widely known today as ‘Wallacea’, named after the pioneer naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace, author of The Malay Archipelago (Wallace 1869). Wallacea, for our purposes, lies between the Sunda and Sahul continental shelves, hence between Borneo/Bali and New Guinea/Australia. For R.E. Dickerson (1928), who first coined the term, Wallacea included the major Philippine and eastern Indonesian archipelagos, the latter comprising Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara (the Lesser Sundas), Timor, and the Moluccas (Fig. 1.1). Many biogeographers since Dickerson have left out the Philippines (excluding Palawan) and the Moluccas from the definition of Wallacea (e.g. Whitmore 1981:xii), but this monograph is focused upon human rather than natural history. The ‘full Wallacea’ between the Sunda and Sahul continental shelves (or between Huxley’s Line of 1868 and the combined Lydekker (1896) and Weber (1894) Lines, see George 1981: Fig. 2.4) is a far more useful and meaningful concept. No land bridges ever crossed the full expanse of this region of deep seas and steeply plunging coastlines during the Pleistocene Ice Ages, even during glacial maxima, and humans migrating from Taiwan or Sundaland towards New Guinea and Australia always had to cross sea gaps between islands to reach their goals. This monograph is focused on archaeological results from just one small group of islands within this intriguing Wallacean zone of animal and human biogeographical transition, a zone that has always formed both a bridge and a barrier between the Asian and Australian continents.