Peter Bellwood


Peter Stafford Bellwood is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is well known for his Early Farming Dispersal Hypothesis and his Out of Taiwan model regarding the spread of Austronesian languages.

Education and career

Peter Bellwood received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1966 and 1980, respectively. His areas of specialization include the human population history of Southeast Asia and the Pacific from archaeological, linguistic and biological perspectives; the worldwide origins of agriculture and resulting cultural, linguistic and biological developments; and the prehistory of human migration. He is researching with Philip J. Piper and Lam My Dzung on an archaeological fieldwork project, funded by the Australian Research Council, on Neolithic sites in Vietnam.
Professor Bellwood was the Secretary-General of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association and was formerly the Editor of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association.
His books have been translated on 16 occasions into French, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Indonesian.
Bellwood is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the archaeology journal Antiquity.

Awards and recognition

Peter Bellwood is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy
In July 2021 Peter Bellwood won the International Cosmos Prize in Osaka, Japan, being the first Australian recipient.

Publications

Books (selected)