A Collaboration Between Linguistics and Genetics: Tracing the Bajo Diaspora History in Eastern Indonesia Philippe Grangé Université de La Rochelle, France pgrange@univ-lr.fr Abstract— This paper aims at comparing and discussing recent findings from human genetics (genomics) and linguistics, regarding the long-lasting question of the Sama-Bajau / Bajo diaspora in Eastern Indonesia, Sulu archipelago (South Philippines) and Sabah (Malaysia). The Bajo are a maritime- oriented people, and some of them were sea nomads until the 1970s. They scattered over this wide zone centuries ago, they forgot their territory of origin, and the original Sama-Bajau language locally diversified in a dozen of languages or dialects. If we consider the common patterns of their origin myths, it seems that they were forced to flee their homeland by a foreign power. Genomics shows early admixtures with the Bugis (South Sulawesi) and the dating of their diaspora broadly matches with the linguistic data. The unidentified political event that drove them out their homeland probably happened at the end of the 11 th century. If genetics and linguistics data correspond, these data are strongly backed. However, we came upon a serious discrepancy about the location of the Sama-Bajau homeland: geneticists assert it was South Sulawesi, while linguists believe it was South Kalimantan, because SB languages are related to South Barito cluster more than to any other language in Southeast Asia. Keywords— Sama-Bajau; Bajo; Sama-Bajau language; sea nomads; maritime diaspora; Bugis; Sulu Archipelago I. INTRODUCTION The Bajo (Sama-Bajau) people are nowadays dispersed in dozens of villages on the coast of eastern Indonesia, southern Philippines (Sulu archipelago) and Sabah (Malaysia). In Indonesia, they call themselves ‘Sama’ [samə] or use the exonym ‘Bajo’, which is not considered offensive (as it may be in the Philippines). The Sama-Bajau language family, which includes a dozen of languages, clearly shows that the communities, scattered thousands of nautical miles away from each other, all came from one and only place of origin. However, the memory of the Sama-Bajau’s homeland has been totally forgotten because their migrations began well before the colonial period and took place in stages. To my knowledge, the Bajo are not mentioned in any old Javanese or Malay text and the first known reference to this ethnic group is a brief jotting written by the Portuguese merchant Tomé Pirès [1] in Malacca around 1515. The question of their origin intrigues and fascinates the Sama-Bajau themselves: unlike other peoples oriented towards maritime activities, and great seamen like the Bugis, the Sama-Bajau cannot refer to any territory of origin, not even to a city or a symbolic monument. Since their ongoing diaspora did not leave any archaeological evidence, only linguistics and genetics can contribute to tracing this migration, back to their homeland. The Sama-Bajau oral tradition evokes various territories of origin, notably in Peninsular Malaysia, but in the absence of historical data, is there any scientific argument to support these traditional origin accounts ? This paper aims at comparing recent findings from human genetics (genomics) and linguistics, two science fields which collaborate more and more. Focusing on Sama-Bajau people, I will deal with genomics data (resulting from a joint research with geneticists from the University of Toulouse and Eijkman Institute in Jakarta) and linguistic data from various scholars, including my field work in many Bajo villages in Eastern Indonesia. The main issue of this paper is to find out if through a transdisciplinary approach (genomics and linguistics) we can understand the stages of this migration and point to the Sama-Bajau territory of origin. The first section reviews the Bajo oral traditions about their origin. There are some common features in almost all of their myths of origin, but they point to different places, depending on which Bajo community we consider. The second section examines and summarizes genomic findings, quoting Kusuma et al. (2017) [2]. They exclude various possibilities regarding the original location of the Bajo ethnic group, so that we can now “zoom” on a particular region of Insular Southeast Asia. The third section deals with the linguistic data, arguing that the Indonesian Bajo did not migrate southwards from South Philippines (as is assumed in the existent literature). Indeed, from the starting point of their dispersion, the Sama- Bajau exiles found refuge in two distinct zones Lastly, we will examine if the findings from genomics and linguistics do match or not, and whether this transdisciplinary approach can provide a convincing clue about the very first Sama-Bajau homeland. 2nd International Conference on Innovative Research Across Disciplines (ICIRAD 2017) Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 134 269