What is it about?
A 4000-year-old plaque painted with a red and white sunburst image from the remote island of Wetar in Indonesia is the first known example of portable art belonging to the Austronesian Painting Tradition, providing a rare glimpse into the symbolic world of prehistory’s greatest maritime voyagers. Prehistoric art is difficult to date because it usually occurs on rock walls rather than in archaeological deposit. But this rare find of a plaque in an archaeological layer allows us to use radiocarbon dating to date the painting to 4000 years ago. This is at the beginning of the period when Austronesian-speaking peoples were rapidly dispersing into Island Southeast Asia.
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Why is it important?
Austronesian is the most widespread language dispersal in prehistory with descendants of a language from Taiwan now spoken across Island Southeast Asia (including Tagalog, Malay, and Indonesian), the Pacific (including Maori, Hawai'ian, and Fijian, and the Indian Ocean (including Malagasy). This spread was facilitated by the use of outrigger canoes, but why these people set out to explore the oceans is unclear. Pottery, which has previously been used to identify Austronesian arrival and to provide an economic explanation for the expansion, only occurs in the layer above the plaque. Our new find supports the hypothesis that they were instead driven by a compelling ideology.
Perspectives
By the time of the plaque, an inter-island network trading obsidian from Wetar to five other islands in the region had existed at the site for thousands of years. Ambitious Austronesian pioneers may have been drawn to such maritime centres of influence. A switch in shell bead types in the archaeological sequence occurs in the same layer as the plaque, providing independent evidence for the arrival of a new ideology.
Ceri Shipton
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: 4000-year-old painted plaque from Southeast Indonesia reveals Austronesian Painting Tradition preceded Neolithic pottery, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2611580123.
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