Peter Stafford Bellwood is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the School of Archaeology and Anthropology of the Australian National University in Canberra. He received his PhD from King's College in Cambridge in 1980. His areas of specialization include the prehistory of Southeast Asia and the Pacific from archaeological, linguistic and biological perspectives; origins of agriculture and resulting cultural, linguistic and biological developments ; interdisciplinary connections between archaeology, linguistics and human biology. He is 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 corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary fellow of the Associazione Internationale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l'Oriente. He aims to understand the movement of individuals of the past, rather than using a very narrow approach, which solely relies on material culture and crops. Bellwood was involved with a fieldwork project in the northern Moluccas islands of eastern Indonesia, involving joint research with Indonesian scholars and Geoffrey Irwin of Auckland University. Their work yielded cave sequences covering the past 35,000 years, with very clear signals of an Austronesian presence commencing after 4000 BP. Bellwood conducted the ARC Discovery project from 2014 to 2017 in which they focused on the migration of humans with regards to the Asia Neolithic time period. Professor Bellwood is now recently retired but he is still open to advise anyone anxious to do research in the East and Southeast Asia Neolithic especially relating to the migration of humans which is what he focuses on.
