The Austronesian diaspora is a big phenomenon within the history of mankind, as seen from several aspects. From the area of dispersal, this language family presents within the area of more than half of the globe, covering archipelagoes from Madagascar in the west to Easter Islands in the east and from Taiwan and Micronesia in the north to New Zealand in the south. This is the largest area of language dispersal before the era of the West Colonization. In term of the dispersal time, Austronesian language spread very fast in a very vast area. For instance, the dispersal from the Philippines area to western Pacific through Indonesia occurred only in hundreds of years, between 4,0003,500 years ago. Viewed from the speaker aspect, the Austronesian speaking people have big variations in physical performance as well as in their culture.

Such phenomenon makes Austronesian and its speakers a very interesting and never ending research, not only in national but also in regional and global scope. Besides the diaspora, the development of their culture, from the emergence up to the present, is another interesting issue. Their presence in different environments has gradually created the local typical cultures as resuts of the adaptation process. It is not a coincidence to mention Austronesian speaking people as the ethnogeneses of different nations and as the fundamental of various cultures of people that now live within the area of dispersal. Hereupon the presence of the Austronesians can be viewed as a symbol of togetherness among peoples in the dispersal area.

This book discusses the Austronesian diaspora and the ethnogeneses of people in Indonesian Archipelago, issues discussed in the International Symposium organized by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in 2005 in Solo. As it concerns new findings and insights from different discipline perspectives and wrote by international scholars, this book should be very important to broaden our knowledge about Austronesia and the Austronesian speaking people. We hope that this book can motivate the development of the Austronesian study in Indonesia in the future