75 Anos de vestigaÇõÇæes ArqueolÇügicas em Timor-Leste (75 Years of Archaeological Research in Timor-Leste)

The island of Timor, the largest of the Lesser Sunda Islands, soon attracted the attention of researchers in various fields, including anthropologists, ethnographers, geologists, botanists and archaeologists. The western half of the island, part of the Dutch East Indies until 1949, and the Eastern Islands of Indonesia from then onwards, saw most research being conducted by Dutch scholars. The eastern part of Timor was primarily targeted by Portuguese researchers, whose colonial period lasted from the mid-sixteenth century until 1975. The first period of archaeological research in Timor, in the 1930s, was generally of low quality, developed mainly by non-archaeologists and resulted in very few publications. Most fieldwork took place before radiometric dating methods were in use, which led to an erroneous interpretation of the nature and age of some excavated deposits. It was not until the late 1960s and especially after the restoration of independence, in 2002, that a chronological sequence for the cultural prehistory of Timor-Leste, based on modern archaeological practice and consistent radiometric determinations, was to be known.