The linguistic and oceanic simulation evidence for Austronesian watercraft innovations
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Second author, presented together with Alexander D. Smith, Jian Yu, and Peter Schuelke Abstract: Austronesian migration into Oceania is one of the great feats of humanity and involved important material innovations in watercraft technology. The presence of some watercraft innovations at the Proto-Austronesian and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian level are informed by linguistic reconstruction. If terms for specific watercraft innovations are reconstructable to a particular level, then we can assume that the referenced technology was indeed present at that level. In this study, we reanalyze the linguistic evidence for watercraft and seafaring terminology and find that much of the reconstructed vocabulary suffers from irregularities that cast doubt on their reconstructability. Rather, we find that key innovations likely spread after PMP migration out of Taiwan. We find that of the four PAN watercraft lexical reconstructions, *qabaŋ ‘boat’, *aluja ‘to paddle’, *layaR ‘sail’, and *nimas ‘to bail water’, only *aluja is well supported at the PAN level. At the PMP level, *layaR ‘sail’, *aluja ‘boat’, and *limas ‘to bail water’ remain well supported, as do some PMP innovations, including *bəRsay ‘paddle’, but others, including the important PMP reconstruction *saRman ‘outrigger’, are not reconstructable to PMP unless one assumes massive phonological irregularity. This suggests that the innovation of the outrigger was not the event that triggered Austronesian migration from Taiwan. The lack of linguistic evidence is complemented by theories on outrigger evolution, which claim that the double-hulled canoe was innovated first, with outriggers developing more recently (Mahdi 1999). Additionally, the phonological irregularity outrigger words typically arise through contact, not inheritance (Grimes & Edwards to appear, Smith 2023). Furthermore, we run oceanic voyaging simulations which demonstrate the centrality of the sail as necessary for voyaging to the Philippines. All of this suggests that the assignment of certain innovations to the PMP speaking community and the assumption that those innovations were precursors for the migration from Taiwan to the Philippines, are unwarranted. Rather, the evolution of watercraft technology occurred over time in a widely dispersed post-expansion Austronesian community.