BA Australian National University, 1977; MA Australian National University, 1982; PhD Australian National University, 1993.

Lecturer with the Centre for Archaeology, University of Western Australia, between 1993 and October 1997. Then took up an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship to investigate the historical archaeology of Luwu, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, reputedly the oldest kingdom of the Bugis people.Also currently carrying out field work on Holocene human evolution in Southeast Asia, especially the Malay Peninsula.

1997 Vice-president, Archaeology Society of Western Australia.

1996-97 Department of Anthropology Teaching and Research Committee.

1996-97 Archaeology in Oceania Editorial Advisory Board

1995-97 Western Australia Maritime Archaeology Advisory Committee.

The Bugis and Makasars of the southwest Sulawesi peninsula acquired an Indic script in about AD 1300 or 1400 and began recording that topic dearest to their hearts, aristocratic genealogies, which over time became embroidered with major events and great deeds. Although there were important connections and regular trade with Majapahit Java by that time, any Indianization in South Sulawesi was always slight, and the early Islamic (17th century) and older systems of government were very similar to those recorded ethnographically in central Oceania, e.g. Tonga. This makes South Sulawesi very significant for understanding indigenous Austronesian transformations leading to complex societies. Luwu is reportedly the very earliest South Sulawesi kingdom, guesstimated in the literature to have been supreme between the 9th and 14th centuries, but an alternative hypothesis, soon to be tested by excavation of identified palace centres and ancestral sites, is that Luwu promulgated its reputation as the ‘mother Bugis culture’ as part of its hegemonic sway over the peninsula throughout the 15th century.

 F.D. Bulbeck. 1986-7. Survey of open archaeological sites in South Sulawesi 1986-1987. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 7: 36-50.

 Bahru Kallupa, David Bulbeck, Ian Caldwell, Iwan Sumantri and Karaeng Demmanari. 1989. Survey Pusat Kerajaan Soppeng 1100-1986 [Survey of the Capital of Soppeng Kingdom 1100-1986]. Final Report to the Australian Myer Foundation. Privately published in Canberra ISBN 073-1690-78-8.

 F.D. Bulbeck. 1990. The landscape of the Makassar War. Canberra Anthropology 13 (1):78-99.

 D. Bulbeck. 1992. Makassar before the Dutch. Echosea Newsletter 4 (9):5-6.

 D. Bulbeck. 1993. New perspectives on early South Sulawesi history. Baruga 9:10-18.

 D. Bulbeck. 1993. Ph.D. dissertation report. Southeast Asian Archaeology International Newsletter (October-November 1993):22-23.

 F.David Bulbeck. 1996. The politics of marriage and the marriage of polities in Gowa, South Sulawesi, during the 16th and 17th centuries. In James J. Fox and Clifford Sather (eds) Origins, Ancestry and Alliance, pp. 280-315. Canberra: Australian National University.

 David Bulbeck. In press. The history and significance of the Macassar fortifications. To appear in Kathryn Robinson and Mukhlis (eds) Living Through Histories: Culture, History and Social Life in South Sulawesi. Canberra: Australian National University, Research School of Pacific Studies; and Jakarta: Arsip Nasional.

The late prehistory of South Sulawesi clearly constitutes an essential context for understanding early historical developments, in areas such as subsistence basis, antiquity of iron working, sociopolitical status within and between societies, regularity of contact with Java and/or the Philippines, etc. The peninsula is also very interesting owing to the similarity between its middle to late Holocene small tool types and those recorded in Australia, as well as the persistence of hunter-gatherer communities in the peninsula’s mountainous interior until the start of this century. Finally, as the largest island between what were the Sunda and Sahul dry continental plates during the Pleistocene, and a land mass with a unique combination of Oriental and Australian elements (all terrestrial mammals are endemic), South Sulawesi is also critical to understanding the Pleistocene colonization of Australasia.

 D. Bulbeck. 1997. Seriated dendrograms. Appendix C in Ambika Flavel’s unpublished BSc Hons subthesis, Sa-Huynh-Kalanay? Analysis of the Prehistoric Decorated Earthenware of South Sulawesi in an Island Southeast Asia Context, pp.212-225. Perth: University of Western Australia.

 David Bulbeck. 1996-7. The Bronze-Iron Age of South Sulawesi, Indonesia: mortuary traditions, metallurgy and trade. To appear in F. David Bulbeck and Noel Barnard (eds), Ancient Chinese and Southeast Asian Bronze Age Cultures. Vol. II, pp. 1007-76. Taipei: Southern Materials Center Inc.

 Monique Pasqua and David Bulbeck. 1997. A technological interpretation of the Toalean, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. To appear in Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia 15:197-214.

The Malay Peninsula is one of the stakeouts of the ‘Negritos’, the short, dark, woolly-haired foragers of Southeast Asia’s rainforests, who have inspired manifold volumes on the region’s ‘racial history’. I am currently analysing data I collected from all of the extant assemblages of skeletal material excavated at the numerous archaeological sites in the peninsula. I will also be collecting dental casts from the Malay Peninsula Aboriginal communities to document their tooth size and dental morphology, for comparison with archaeological collections of teeth.

 F.D. Bulbeck. 1982. A re-evaluation of possible evolutionary processes in Southeast Asia since the late Pleistocene. Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 3:1-21.

 F.D. Bulbeck. 1985. The 1979 Gua Cha skeletal material. Federations Museum Journal 30: 96-7.

 D. Bulbeck. 1994. Negritos and their relatives: biological evidence for a pre-Mongoloid substratum population in greater Southeast Asia. Perspectives in Human Biology 4:65 (abstract).

 David Bulbeck. 1996. Holocene biological evolution of the Malay Peninsula Aborigines (Orang Asli). Perspectives in Human Biology 2:37-61.

More by chance than design, I have also been involved in assisting research at the Modern Economic History of Southeast Asia Project at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, and in editing a book on the East Asian Bronze-Iron Age.

 M.R. Fernando and David Bulbeck (eds). 1992. Chinese Economic Activity in Netherlands India: Selected Translations from the Dutch. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

 David Bulbeck and Li Tana. 1993. Maps of Southern Vietnam, c.1690. In Li Tana and Anthony Reid (eds) Southern Vietnam under the Nguyen: Documents on the Economic History of Cochinchina (Dang Trung) 1602-1777, pp. 38-54. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

 David Bulbeck and Kristine Alilunas-Rodgers. 1993. Exchange rates and commodity prices. In Li Tana and Reid (see above), pp. 135-41.

 F. David Bulbeck and Noel Barnard (eds). 1996-7 (still in press!). Ancient Chinese and Southeast Asian Bronze Age Cultures. Taipei: Southern Materials Center Inc.

 David Bulbeck, Anthony Reid, Tan Lay-Cheng and Yvonne Wu. 1998 (in press). Indonesian Exports since the Thirteenth Century: Cloves, Pepper, Sugar, Coffee. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

I became interested in high-fired ceramics produced for export in East Asia, especially China, Vietnam and Thailand, as these wares are highly distinctive, and common in historical sites in South Sulawesi, to the degree that they provide the main means of dating the sites. But they are also pretty and interesting artifacts to deal with. The circumstances of their export to Island Southeast Asia over the last millennium require more sustained study.

 F.D. Bulbeck. 1990. The tradewares from the Gua Sireh excavation. Appendix B to B in Ipoi Datan's MA, Archaeological Excavations at Gua Sireh (Gerian) and Lubang Anjin (Gunung Mulu National Park), Sarawak, Malaysia, pp. 274-284. Canberra: Australian National University.

 F.D. Bulbeck. 1991. The tradewares from the Sembiran excavations. Appendix D in I. Wayan Ardika's PhD, Archaeological Research in Northeastern Bali, Indonesia, pp. 182-216. Canberra: Australian National University.

 D. Bulbeck. 1995. Trade ceramics in Indonesia. The Journal of the Asian Arts Society of Australia 4 (2):6.

 D. Bulbeck. 1997. Tradeware identifications. Appendix E in Ambika Flavel’s BSc Hons subthesis, Sa-Huynh-Kalanay? Analysis of the Prehistoric Decorated Earthenware of South Sulawesi in an Island Southeast Asia Context, pp.233-236. Perth: University of Western Australia.