First record of painted rock art near Kupang, West Timor, Indonesia, and the origins and distribution of the Austronesian painting tradition

Here we describe a painted art site in an uplifted limestone marine terrace bordering the coast west of Kupang in West Timor, Indonesia. The site comprises panels of hand stencils, anthropomorphs and ‘sun-ray’ motifs which are similar to motifs recorded from Timor-Leste and the Kei islands to the east. We suggest that these motifs fit within a corpus of art found throughout the western Pacific and known as the Austronesian painting tradition (APT). We also discuss the APT more generally and suggest that its origins may lie within the islands of eastern Indonesia rather than in the proto-Austronesian homeland of Taiwan, or in the Philippines.