4000-year-old painted plaque from Southeast Indonesia reveals Austronesian Painting Tradition preceded Neolithic pottery

The Austronesian dispersal is the largest such event in human history, with descendants of people from Taiwan colonizing islands from Rapa Nui to Madagascar. The extent to which this dispersal was facilitated by an economic package or a particular ideology is uncertain. The “Austronesian Painting Tradition” (APT) is a distinctive rock art style dominated by paintings of small human figures, boats, and geometric motifs found in eastern Wallacea and islands around New Guinea. The age of the APT is thus far poorly constrained, with uncertainty over whether it appeared endogenously through earlier Holocene interisland networks, if it arrived with the earliest Austronesian migrants, or if it appeared during the intensified interisland contact of the Indonesian Metal Age beginning ~2,500 y ago. Here we report the recovery of a painted stone plaque excavated in situ from archaeological excavation on Wetar Island, Maluku. The plaque occurs in a transitional layer between Paleolithic and Neolithic occupation. It bears a classic “Austronesian” red concentric circle and sun-ray motif and is dated to between 4090 and 3900 cal. BP, significantly earlier than the first pottery at the site and in this region. The early date for this plaque in a preceramic layer and its location in southeast Maluku supports the view that the APT had an early origin, and that the Austronesian diaspora was either propelled by or leveraged a compelling symbolic ideology.