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4	Introduction The study of material culture and cultural institutions in a comparative frame can contribute to prehistory in the same way as genetics and linguistics. Many types of material culture inevitably have a very limited presence in the archaeological record; nevertheless there is every reason to consider they were integral to the societies whose lifeways we are trying to reconstruct. Musical instruments represent an interesting case, because their morphology is so marked that they can be unambiguously identified. Where a particular language phylum which has a strong archaeological correlates, such as Austronesian, it should be possible to piece together the relations between the expansion of the phylum and its changing musical culture.
5	Something on methods Material culture studies tend to be synchronic in nature; more attention is given to the use of tin cans in society than to the historical process where such cans came to be diffused worldwide in a short period of time. In more recent times, the spread of material culture has been completely delinked from demographic movement through the operations of multi-national businesses. But in the recent past, the establishment of the great language phyla of the world was in part associated with movement of populations and in turn the spread of languages and associated cultural elements. The assumption that this was the case was hot news in 1900 and up to the 1930s. German and Swedish schools of material culture studies, Kulturkreislehre et al., actively trawled ethnographic and museum material to produce distribution maps.
6	Something on methods II Within the Anglo-American tradition such studies began to die during the 1930s, and part of the reason was that no effective explanatory models underlay these vast assemblages of data. But from the 1990s, the alliance of archaeology, genetics and linguistics has provided just such a frame. If Austronesian or Indo-European or Uto-Aztecan can be modelled as a historical expansion of people and culture as well as language then the distribution of material culture can be correlated with these other elements. It is important not to confuse this with conventional diffusionism, which is typically concerned with ‘high-culture’ elements that are most likely to have spread (or not) well after the establishment of the major language phyla. The argument is that there are certain items of material culture of sufficient antiquity that they were carried, literally, by the movement of speakers as the phylum evolved.
7	Something on methods III Typical objections to this procedure concern independent invention and negative evidence and these can be very real objections with functional technologies such as hunting techniques. But musical instruments have essentially arbitrary morphologies, rather like lexemes represent arbitrary choices of phonemes to refer to something It is easy to show that there is a low index of reinvention and that numerous geographical bottlenecks exist, that once lost, an instrument does not tend to be reinvented, as Australia and the New World illustrate Two previous papers have looked at the way musical instruments can be used as markers for other types of reconstruction of prehistory. At EURASEAA I presented a reconstruction of musical practices in the Austronesian region that could be traced back to Taiwan. This a follow-up, describing instruments that appear to be typical of the Austronesian region but which are not attested in Taiwan.
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13	The legacy of Taiwan Instruments include the leg-xylophone, multi-blade Jews’ harps, stamping tubes, musical bow and small struck bamboo slit-gong Musical practices include polyphonic choral singing, the stick dance. Many of these are widespread in the Austronesian area But a whole suite of instruments appear to be developed in the Philippines and to spread out from there
14	The shark-sistrum A highly distinctive feature of much of the Oceanian culture area is shark-calling. Individuals or groups are deemed to have particular relations with sharks and to be able to call them by means of the shark-sistrum. These are cane-loops with rattling materials threaded on the loop and are held in the hand and rattled (underwater?). These are recorded from the Sulu region, Biak, New Britain, New Ireland and Samoa and probably exist in intermediate areas (Sachs 1928; Collaer 1965:78; Kunst 1967).
15	The concussion-buzzer The distribution of the concussion-buzzer is very intriguing as it occurs in Luzon, Nias, Sulawesi and among the Orang Asli in the Malay Peninsula. Although this is typical of the Austronesian region, it seems difficult to explain why it should have disappeared from so much of the central area of the Philippines and somehow bypassed Borneo.
16	The gong Despite their pan-western Austronesian distribution, gongs are almost certainly not present in the first wave of Austronesian expansion. On chronological grounds, the type of bronze technology required to make them had not been developed by the putative period of early expansion (3800 BP). It seems likely that they were developed and spread on the mainland and made their way gradually eastwards to the islands in a series of trade flows. The development of tuned sets of gongs may be a typical Javanese development that spread back the mainland.
17	The wedge-laced drum A
18	The wedge-laced drum Drums were unknown in Taiwan so they seem to have been innovated in the post-Formosan region. Although drums are very common and clearly ancient in mainland cultures, a particular type of drum evolved in the Austronesian region, the wedge-laced drum Drums with similar systems of tensioning the head occur in the Philippines, Sulawesi, Borneo, and much of Indonesia. The furthest extent seems to be the Bird’s Head Peninsula in West Papua the term kimbal in Ibaloi in Luzon is clearly cognate with gimbal (Batak in Palawan) and Mamanwa gimbar in Mindanao. Both the drum and the name can be reconstructed with some confidence to proto-Philippines.
19	The resonated musical bow The gourd-resonated musical bow, where a dried gourd, coconut-shell or tin can is attached to the bow and the string struck with sticks. The resonator is open at the base and placed against the chest, thus muffling or amplifying the sound. This instrument is recorded from Luzon in the Northern Philippines and nowhere else in the Austronesian region except on the island of Guam in the Marianas, which seems to correlate rather well with archaeological and linguistic findings
20	The resonated musical bow
21	The idiochord tube-zither The idiochord tube-zither is a bamboo internode with strings raised up from the epidermis (hence the term idiochord) between two internodes. Small wooden bridges are inserted under the strings both to lift them from the surface of the bamboo and to tune them. All these are relatively recent and the basic type is still widely played in the Philippines and Indonesia. The broad distribution of the tube-zither is Philippines, Indonesia, Madagascar, Việt Nam. The Aslian groups of the Malay peninsula also play the zither, although not the surrounding Malay. Its presence in Madagascar is presumably due to the migrations of the Maanyan, one of the Barito groups now thought to have been the main source of the peopling of the Great Isle. Tube-zithers are entirely absent in Melanesia and Polynesia, and Oceanic speakers had already lost his instrument when they began their expansion.
22	The idiochord tube-zither
23	The idiochord tube-zither The Seychelles are not usually considered part of the Austronesian zone, but a curious piece of evidence suggests a link, probably with Madagascar, perhaps through the slave trade. A remarkable Seychellois tube-zither, one of the disappearing anciens instruments, which is now used as a type of end-blown horn. The instrument retains the organological properties of the Austronesian tube-zither but these are no longer understood by the players.
24	The struck idiochord tube-zither This instrument is made in a similar fashion to the polychordal tube-zither, but it has only one or two strings, supported by a common bridge, and is not intended to be tuned. The noise is typically an indeterminate buzzing sound. The strings are either plucked with the fingers or beaten with two light sticks, rather like a slit-gong. In the Philippines at least, these instruments are used to scare birds away from the corn. They occur through most of Indonesia including Sumatra, Nias and Sulawesi, but are only recorded in Melanesia from Biak in a monochord form and then disappear altogether
25	The struck idiochord tube-zither
26	The stick-zither
27	The stick-zither The stick-zither is a flat stick with projections on one end, and one or two strings are stretched along its length. The strings are strummed and then the projections used like frets to alter the pitch of the string. The stick-zither is unknown in the Philippines, but widespread in Borneo, Sulawesi and was also carried to Madagascar and the East African coast. The exact distribution is still poorly recorded, but it is present on Ternate, Halmahera and Sumba, but absent from the main islands of Indonesia
28	The notch-flute The notch-flute is a hollow, cylindrical flute made from a reed with a V-shaped notch cut in the end which acts as an embouchure. Notch-flutes are found virtually throughout the Philippines, in Indonesia. It seems to be absent in New Guinea. The notch-flute is one of the few instruments where a linguistic reconstruction is possible; from Isneg in Luzon to Mamanwa in Mindanao, the name is *p-l-n-d-g, suggesting that the instrument was carried throughout the region
29	The notch-flute
30	The pan-pipe Panpipes are single-note tubes, closed at the base, bound together in sets. Typically in this region, there are four or five tubes and they are relatively short. Panpipes are found in the Cordillera or Northern Luzon. Panpipes are apparently absent in the rest of the Philippines and in Sulawesi although they are recorded in Java, but common in parts of New Guinea and the Solomons. In New Guinea, panpipes occur in the Sepik river area and on New Ireland. The panpipes of the Are’are of the Solomons have been extensively recorded and described by Hugo Zemp. For Polynesia it seems that only museum specimens exist for Samoa (Moyle 1988:51) and Tonga This gap in distribution leads to the question as to whether these occurrences of panpipes are connected. Between the Cordillera and the Sepik is a long distance for panpipes to be completely eliminated. Moreover, the Melanesian region has a whole spectrum of panpipe types. However, panpipes were recorded both in Fiji and in most of the Polynesian islands even as far as New Zealand, although they are moribund throughout this region. It may thus be that the early Austronesian panpipes are connected with South China (and the culture of rice-terraces) and that the panpipes of Melanesia are part of the ancient Papuan culture. Oceanic speakers would then have picked them up in the encounter with Papuans and they would have spread in turn to Fiji and Polynesia.
31	The pan-pipe
32	Austronesian music among the Aslian The instruments discussed here are typical of Austronesian-speakers with one important exception, the Aslian or aboriginal populations of the Malay peninsula The Aslian speak Austroasiatic languages, but these instruments are not found elsewhere in the Austroasiatic world It is therefore likely they took them over from the pre-Malay, diverse Austronesians who once inhabited the Malay peninsula. As the Malay expanded, adopted Islam and a musical culture influenced by Java, only the Aslian maintained the prior musical culture of the region
33	Conclusions Austronesian expanded rapidly across lightly inhabited territory and largely carried with it a repertoire of material culture. Human inventiveness is quite limited in the sphere of musical instruments, hence we can associate particular types with specific language groups, especially in this region. Distributional data also enables us to detect which instruments, now apparently typical of the region, represent later spread and are therefore not associated with the initial expansion.
34	Conclusions II Clearly this method can be applied to other spheres of synchronic material culture. It enables us to reconstruct aspects of culture that would be invisible archaeologically and sometimes linguistically. But this type of study is virtually dead, which is unfortunate, as current material culture is being eliminated rapidly without being documented
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