Peter Bellwood received his BA and PhD from King's College, Cambridge, in 1966 and 1980 respectively. His areas of specialization include the human population history of Southeast Asia and the Pacific from archaeological, linguistic and biological perspectives; the worldwide origins of agriculture and resulting cultural, linguistic and biological developments; and the prehistory of human migration. He is currently[update] researching with Philip J. Piper and Lam My Dzung on an archaeological fieldwork project, funded by the Australian Research Council, on Neolithic sites in Vietnam.[3][4]
Professor Bellwood was the Secretary-General of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association (1990 to 2009) and was formerly the Editor of the Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association (now the Journal of Indo-Pacific Archaeology).[4]
His books have been translated into French, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Indonesian. Further translations are in progress into Chinese (Complex and Simplified).
Bellwood is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the archaeology journal Antiquity.[5]
In July 2021 Peter Bellwood won the International Cosmos Prize in Osaka, Japan, being the first Australian recipient.[6]
Publications
Books (selected)
Peter Bellwood (2023), First Farmers, second edition, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN978-1-119-70634-2
Peter Bellwood (2022), The Five-Million-Year Odyssey, Princeton University Press, ISBN978-0-691-19757-9. Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award in Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, and Ancient History, Association of American Publishers.
Peter Bellwood (2019), The Spice Islands in Prehistory, ANU Press, ISBN978-1-76046-290-1
Peter Bellwood (2007), Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago, 3rd edition, ANU E-Press, ISBN978-1-921313-11-0
Peter Bellwood (2005), First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN978-0-631-20566-1. Winner of the Association of American Publishers (Washington D.C.) Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing (Archaeology and Anthropology) for 2006; and winner of a Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology (Washington D.C. 2006).