Peter Bellwood

Peter Stafford Bellwood (born Leicester, England, 1943) is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

He is well known for his Out of Taiwan model regarding the spread of Austronesian languages.

Peter Bellwood received his BA and PhD from Cambridge University (King's College) 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 (1990 to 2009) and was formerly the Editor of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association (now the Journal of Indo-Pacific Archaeology).

His books have been translated into French, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Indonesian.

Further translations are in progress into Chinese (Complex and Simplified) and Turkish.

Bellwood is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the archaeology journal Antiquity.

Peter Bellwood 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 (Rome).

In July 2021 Peter Bellwood won the International Cosmos Prize in Osaka, Japan, being the first Australian recipient.