| Abstract: |
This article is neither a data paper nor a thorough review of data. Rather, it is an attempt to present a framework for the culture history of the Austronesian-speaking peoples alternative to the traditional one first presented by Robert Heine-Geldern (1932), with variations and additions by many others. I look briefly at the old data and their interpretation, then at the data assembled during the last twenty years and what interpretations have been made from these. With this background I make conjectures on the origin, expansion, and interactions of the Austronesian-speaking peoples. Should these conjectures prove to be even partially true, they would be so extremely different from the traditional culture history that they should lead to a very different self-image for those people and a somewhat different framework for the development of world culture.
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