Peter Bellwood

Peter Stafford Bellwood (born Leicester, England, 1943) is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He is well known for his Out of Taiwan model regarding the spread of Austronesian languages.

Education and career

Peter Bellwood received his BA and PhD from Cambridge University (King's College) in 1966 and 1980 respectively. His areas of specialization include the human population history of Southeast Asia and the Pacific from archaeological, linguistic and biological perspectives; the worldwide origins of agriculture and resulting cultural, linguistic and biological developments; and the prehistory of human migration. He is currently researching with Philip J. Piper and Lam My Dzung on an archaeological fieldwork project, funded by the Australian Research Council, on Neolithic sites in Vietnam.

Professor Bellwood was the Secretary-General of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association (1990 to 2009) and was formerly the Editor of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association (now the Journal of Indo-Pacific Archaeology).

His books have been translated into French, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Indonesian. Further translations are in progress into Chinese (Complex and Simplified) and Turkish.

Awards and recognition

Peter Bellwood is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Associazione Internationale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l'Oriente (Rome).

In July 2021 Peter Bellwood won the International Cosmos Prize in Osaka, Japan, being the first Australian recipient.

Publications

Books (selected)

• Peter Bellwood (2022), The Five-Million-Year Odyssey, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-19757-9.
• Peter Bellwood (2019), The Spice Islands in Prehistory, ANU Press, ISBN 978-1-760-46290-1.
• Peter Bellwood (2017), First Islanders: Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia, Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-925-02127-1.
• Peter Bellwood, Eusebio Dizon (2013), 4000 Years of Migration and Cultural Exchange, ANU Press, ISBN 978-1-925-02128-8.
• Peter Bellwood (2013), First Migrants: Ancient Migration in Global Perspective, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-1-4051-8908-8.
• Peter Bellwood (2005), First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-0-631-20566-1. Revised edition due for publication March 2023.
• Ian Glover; Peter S. Bellwood (2004), Southeast Asia: from prehistory to history, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-29777-6.
• Peter S. Bellwood; Colin Renfrew (2002), Examining the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, ISBN 978-1-902937-20-5.
• Peter S. Bellwood (1985), Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, Academic Press, University of Hawai'i Press, ANU Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-1907-1. Fully revised edition 1997, republished 2007.
• Peter S. Bellwood; James J. Fox; Darrell T. Tryon (1995), The Austronesians: historical and comparative perspectives, ANU E Press, ISBN 978-0-7315-2132-6.
• Peter S. Bellwood (1978), Man's conquest of the Pacific: the prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania, Collins and Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-520103-1.
• Peter S. Bellwood (1978), The Polynesians: Prehistory of an Island People, Thames and Hudson, ISBN 978-0-500-02093-7. Revised edition 1987.

See also

• Austronesian Hypothesis
• Demic diffusion – the impact of farming on human migration is a key research interest (see references above)