| Abstract: |
Historical linguistics and archaeology have a proven record of useful collaborative work. However, the distinctively different nature of the raw material of each discipline can easily lead researchers in the two disciplines toward different conclusions. It is important to recognise that this is perhaps inevitable, but that divergence between the conclusions of the two fields is sometimes the result of over interpretation of negative evidence, a methodological flaw that lies behind some archaeological arguments relating to the prehistory of Island Southeast Asia. Both linguistic and archaeological records will always be fragmentary, and where inferences drawn from them differ dramatically from one another, the most rational evaluation metric is the strength of each argument in terms of how successfully it competes against alternative explanations within its own discipline, not a prioritisation of the evidence of one academic discipline as against another.
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