Austronesians refer to people speaking an Austronesian language (originally termed Malayo-Polynesian) widely spoken in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Austronesians represent the largest and most widespread language group in the world; today there are about 350 million Austronesian-speaking peoples. With their language came a shared ancestry, gene pool, and many common elements in their material cultures.

Much scholarship in the last 20 years has focused on new ways of looking at the origins of the Austronesian-speaking people. It was widely believed, and taught in schools, that the different waves of migrations that peopled these regions originated out of the Sunda Shelf (south-to-north migration) by groups traveling on outrigger boats.

In recent years, the work of many scholars show that the ancestral origin of these peoples were in southern China and Taiwan (a north-to-south migration), with the roots of their languages still traceable to Taiwan and the Philippines.

The publication Paths of Origins – The Austronesian Heritage broadens the scope of this particular north-to-south discussion by focusing on artifacts (ethnographic evidence) in the collections of the National Museum of Indonesia, and National Museum of Ethnography in the Netherlands that stand witness to the Austronesian heritage.