| Abstract: |
This chapter analyses the current state of research on the beginnings of Indian contact with Island Southeast Asia. It presents a comparative reconstruction of early Austronesian society and some aspects of post‐Early Metal Age history. The chapter highlights that the living peoples of Island Southeast Asia owe the greater part of their cultural and biological ancestries to events of migration, selection, and admixture that occurred long before the first Indians arrived with glass beads around 200 BCE, or the first Moslems in Medieval times, or the Portuguese, or the Dutch. Island Southeast Asia still has many celebrated living 'megalithic' cultures that erect and/or carve large stone monuments ‐ on Nias Island, amongst the Bataks of northern Sumatra, in parts of northern Borneo, amongst the Toraja in Sulawesi, and in some of the Lesser Sunda Islands.
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