Exploring the Continuity of Settlement Tradition Through Australasia and Oceania over 65,000 Years

This paper contains an overview of the human colonisation of Australasia and Oceania over the last 65,000 years, and highlights the resultant diversity of settlement types, place and cultural landscape formations, and architectural solutions, but simultaneously gives attention to the long-term retention of particular traditions throughout the study region. The time, geographic and multi-cultural scales are thus vast, implying this is a study in the category of ‘deep history’. However, the author has drawn from his editing of the regional volume of ‘Australasia and Oceania,’ for the 2nd edition of the Encyclopaedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, or EVAW 2, containing some 200 contributions on this region. Two migratory events are explored. The first is that of Aboriginal people into Australia some 65,000 years ago. The second is the Austronesian migrations into the Pacific Ocean from 5000 to 1500 BP. Despite millennia of cultural, environmental, climatic, economic and warfare disruptions, a series of continuities of tradition are identified and analysed in a limited manner due to the brevity of the paper. However, the paper provides a significant contribution in making such a broad-scale holistic overview of the pattern languages of building traditions that link communities in Oceania and Australasia arising from past migrations and drawing on multi-disciplinary sources.