Formosan Evidence for Early Austronesian Knowledge of Iron

Linguistic evidence for a knowledge of iron that predates the archaeological evidence for iron technology has had a checkered history in Austronesian linguistics over the past four decades. This squib reevaluates five comparisons first proposed by the writer in 1976, and discards three of them. Based on internal Formosan evidence from languages belonging to different primary branches of the family, it then draws attention to two new comparisons relating to iron that are not likely to be due to diffusion, and raises the question once more whether a knowledge of iron might have preceded iron-working in the Austronesian world by several millennia.