Peter Bellwood

Peter Stafford Bellwood (born Leicester, England, 1943) is a Professor of Archaeology at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology of the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. His areas of specialization include prehistory of Southeast Asia and the Pacific from archaeological, linguistic and biological perspectives; origins of agriculture and resulting cultural, linguistic and biological developments (worldwide); interdisciplinary connections between archaeology, linguistics and human biology. He is currently involved in archaeological fieldwork projects in the Philippines and Vietnam.

Professor Bellwood is the Secretary-General of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association and editor of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association, a member of the following editorial boards: Asian Perspectives; Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory; Journal of Austronesian Studies; Journal of World Prehistory; Review of Archaeology; Sarawak Museum Journal. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

A fieldwork project in the northern Moluccas islands of eastern Indonesia, involving joint research with Indonesian scholars and Geoffrey Irwin of Auckland University yielded cave sequences covering the past 35,000 years, with very clear signals of an Austronesian presence commencing after 4000 BP.

See also

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