The Soul of a House: Decorating with Warmth, Style, and Comfort

All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan. we can now turn to archaeological evidence. While the debris of ancient village sites does not include fossilized words along with bones and pottery, it does reveal movements of people and cultural artifacts that could be associated with languages. Like the rest of the world, most of the present Austronesian realm—Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and many Pacific islands—was originally occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking pottery, polished stone tools, domestic animals, and crops. (The sole exceptions to this generalization are the remote islands of Madagascar, eastern Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, which were never reached by hunter-gatherers and remained empty of humans until the Austronesian expansion.) The first archaeological signs of something different within the Austronesian realm come from—Taiwan. Beginning around the fourth millennium b.c., polished stone tools and a distinctive decorated pottery style (so-called Ta-p'en-k'eng pottery) derived from earlier South China mainland pottery appeared on Taiwan and on the opposite coast of the South China mainland ...»