Hunter-gatherer occupations of small islands are rare in world prehistory and it is widely accepted that island settlement is facilitated by agriculture. The Ryukyu Islands contradict that understanding on two counts: not only did they have a long history of hunter-gatherer settlement, but they also have a very late date for the onset of agriculture, which only reached the archipelago between the eighth and thirteenth centuries AD. Here, we combine archaeology and linguistics to propose a tripartite model for the spread of agriculture and Ryukyuan languages to the Ryukyu Islands. Employing demographic growth, trade/piracy and the political influence of neighbouring states, this model provides a synthetic yet flexible understanding of farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyus within the complex historical background of medieval East Asia.

Archaeolinguistics Research Group Department of Archaeology Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena Germany

Department of Archaeology Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena Germany

Faculty of Arts Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Faculty of Humanities Nicolaus Copernicus University Toruń Poland

Institut d'Asie Orientale ENS de Lyon Lyon France

Institut für Ur und Frühgeschichte Zentrum für Altertumswissenschaften Universität Heidelberg Heidelberg Germany

Research Center for Archaeology Kagoshima University Kagoshima Japan

Research Center for Buried Cultural Properties Kumamoto University Kumamoto Japan

Research Center for the Pacific Islands Kagoshima University Kagoshima 890 8580 Japan

School of Archaeology University of Oxford Oxford UK

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