Earliest settlement in the Marianas—a response RIESENBERG, S.H. 1965. Table of voyages affecting Micronesian islands. Supplement to R.T. Simmons, J.J. Graydon, D.C. Gajdusek & P. Brown, Blood group genetic variations in natives of the Caroline Islands and in other parts of Micronesia. Oceania 36: 132–70. RYE, O.S. 1976. Keeping your temper under control: materials and the manufacture of Papuan pottery. Archaeology and Physical Anthropology in Oceania 9: 106–37. SPRIGGS, M. 2010. Comments on ‘Farming and language in Island Southeast Asia. Reframing Austronesian history’. Current Anthropology 51(2): 245. – 2011. Archaeology and the Austronesian expansion. Where are we now? Antiquity 85: 510–28. STAROSTA, S. 1995. A grammatical subgrouping of Formosan languages, in P. Jen-kuei Li Li, C. Tsang, Y. Huang, D. Ho & C. Tseng (ed.) Austronesian studies relating to Taiwan (Symposium series of the Institute of History and Philology 3): 683–726 Taipei: Academica Sinica. SUMMERHAYES, G. 2009. Obsidian network patterns in Melanesia – sources, characterisation and distribution. Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin 29: 109–24. TOPPING, D.M. 1973. Chamorro reference grammar. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawai‘i; Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. ZOBEL, E. 2002. The position of Chamorro and Palauan in the Austronesian family tree: evidence from verb morphology and morphosyntax, in F. Wouk & M. Ross (ed.) The history and typology of western Austronesian voice systems (Pacific Linguistics 518): 405–34. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Earliest settlement in the Marianas—a response Hsiao-chun Hung 1,2 , Mike T. Carson 3 & Peter Bellwood 1 Reference to our original paper (Hung et al. 2011) will show that we did not suggest that the Marianas were settled directly from the Cagayan Valley, nor did we insist on the northern Philippines as the only possible source for the Chamorro. We hold to our conclusion: “While the first explorers to discover the Mariana Islands may have possessed many cultural traits and skills shared commonly throughout a broad region, the subsequent successful colonisation indicates strong similarities of pottery type and language with the northern Philippines” (Hung et al. 2011: 923). Nowhere in eastern Indonesia, Palau, Yap or New Guinea has pottery so far been found which could be considered ancestral to the early Marianas pottery, or even to Lapita. Winter et al. refer to Morotai, an island north of Halmahera, as a possible way-station. But Morotai has a Papuan-speaking (non-Austronesian) population that so far lacks any record of pottery older than about 2000 BP (Bellwood et al. 1998). 1 School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia 2 Department of Archaeology and Natural History, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia (Author for correspondence, email: Hsiao-chun.hung@anu.edu.au) 3 Micronesian Area Research Centre, University of Guam, Mangilao, GU 96923, USA C  Antiquity Publications Ltd. 910