OCeanic and South East Asian Navigators.

Project Information

OCSEAN

Grant agreement ID: 873207

DOI

10.3030/873207

Project closed

EC signature date 27 November 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 2 359 800,00

EU contribution

€ 2 042 400,00

Coordinated by

TARTU ULIKOOL
Estonia

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OCSEAN (OCeanic and South East Asian Navigators.)

Reporting period: 2020-01-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Oceanic and South East Asian Navigators (OCSEAN) project unites researchers from Canada, Europe, Island Southeast Asia and Oceania to re-evaluate our understanding of the Austronesian expansion. It does so using new high-density data from archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics and genetics, and aims to unite them within a common statistical framework. OCSEAN achieves a true synthesis of disciplines using state-of-the-art computational and statistical methods to interrogate the structural relationship between joint data sets. The research contextualizes the expansion of the Austronesian language family within the growing evidence for social and political complexity across Island Southeast Asia and coastal mainland regions prior to the arrival of rice and millet agriculture to Taiwan during the mid 5th millennium BP. It also takes into account the rich history of interaction since the spread of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian outside of Taiwan. OCSEAN brings together leading researchers from the humanities and sciences and combines the resources of multiple laboratories to tackle questions that can only be addressed with this extensive network of cooperation. We will embrace the complexities of the archaeological, genetic and linguistic records, providing an alternative to directional, progressive and technological deterministic models, whilst recognizing the difficulties inherent in identifying concepts of culture or ethnicity with archaeological evidence, because of the very fluidity of these constructs. Through our combined expertise, we will demonstrate that a new way of working with big data leads to new insights at the small scale. In doing so, it will fundamentally change the way people do research.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Movement of people is at the core of OCSEAN. Post-pandemic, OCSEAN got a 2-year extension and during the first stage the main activities concentrated on building the training and knowledge transfer network between EU and Third Country (TC) researchers, summing altogether 186 person months of secondments. Activities took off with a 3-month capacity building Summer Training Courses in Uppsala 2022. Training was organized in linguistic data collection, management and archiving and workshops on archeology, anthropology, heritage conservation, and population genetics. Participants from the Philippines, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea prepared with the skills and knowledge building for data collection. Summer Training ended with the First OCSEAN International Conference. The experience was documented on the first video from OCSEAN by Pomona Pictures (https://www.ocsean.eu/post/ocsean-first-video-published-linguistics-training-to-record-to-preserve-to-explain). This will later serve as field outreach material in projects dissemination activities. Intensive training of TC partners for field work in the Summer School was combined with ample opportunities to build the network and new collaborations amongst the OCSEAN community. As a direct ripple effect came the creation of a local OCSEAN initiative group by the partners from the Philippines who organized an OCSEAN themed conference in 2023 in the Philippines. Further five workshops on documenting languages took place in the Philippines and Indonesia, preparing local experts to work in their countries to document Austronesian languages, some of them endangered. Archaeological excavations and Field School in the Philippines during summer 2023 was a collaboration that started from dialogues with local researchers and community. Methods of oral heritage recording were discussed in the Philippines during workshops and a series of eight ethnolinguistic lectures were held in Taiwan.
The aim of OCSEAN is to collect comprehensive datasets from the fields of archaeology, linguistics, genetics to be analyzed with tools of their respective filed and eventually jointly in a common statistical framework. The first period has been preparing the ground by the training. Also, methods development during lockdown led to the publication of CLARITY software. At the same time a genetic dataset from published sources was combined and analyzed to learn about the population structure of Island Southeast Asia and Oceania in line with the OCSEAN aims of probing the past and the demographic history in the region. Main activities during the first reporting period were training and networking events - workshops, lectures, seminars, conferences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

OCSEAN builds on and enhances local expertise, creating a network of EU and TC partners, including indigenous communities and local researchers. This is the prerequisite for inclusive science and data collection by local experts in their respective communities to describe and preserve local languages, genetic and archaeological heritage. Staff participation in the consortium’s secondment activities has expanded and deepen their knowledge on Asia-Pacific origins and demographic history, as well as sharpen their research and collaborative skills in approaching future scientific challenges in a more holistic and multifaceted way. Such research skills in genetics, linguistics, anthropology, archeology or data science are transferable, which will be useful when our alumni engage in new career options, either within or outside academia. This is especially important, given the trajectory of future working environments, where premium is placed much on integrating various disciplines to coherently solve real world problems. OCSEAN has empowered and inspired researchers on site to take on new research projects and avenues. The consortium’s secondment and networking activities will give an opportunity for all partner organizations to access external sources of expert knowledge, attract exceptional and motivated talents, widen their reach to new geographic areas, and advance their research into novel and promising prospects.
OCSEAN will continue nourishing this collaboration network between people from different cultures and disciplines, to eventually able to analyses the complex datasets from different fields in the comprehensive statistical framework.

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