Ancestral domain or ancestral lands are the lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. The term differs from indigenous land rights, Aboriginal title or Native Title by directly indicating relationship to land based on ancestry, while domain indicates relationships beyond material lands and territories, including spiritual and cultural aspects that may not be acknowledged in land titles and legal doctrine about trading ownership.

Indigenous peoples may prefer to be described as custodians or guardians of their ancestral domain or lands rather than as title owners or land owners.

The concept of individual property ownership and land tenure that can be traded was often introduced as part of colonialism. While the Western model of land ownership gives an individual the property right to control land as a commodity, indigenous conceptions have a cultural and spiritual character. They invoke a mutual responsibility and relationship between land and people.

Professor Michael Dodson AM described Aboriginal Australians' idea of country using the term during his Australian of the Year speech. He said:

For us, country is a word for all the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with the area and its features. It in fact describes the entirety of our ancestral domains. So when we acknowledge traditional country, as increasingly people do so in Australia, it's no empty ritual: it's to acknowledge who we, the Aboriginal people, are and our place in this nation. In doing that, it seems to me, all Australians might have a clearer notion of who they are and where they stand in relation to their history and the land they live in.

The term was used as early as the 1920s in the work of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Initially, the ILO was concerned with the situation of indigenous and tribal peoples in their roles as workers in the overseas colonies of European powers. It became increasingly evident that indigenous peoples were exposed to severe labour exploitation and had a need for special protection in cases where they were expelled from their ancestral domains only to become seasonal, migrant, bonded or home-based labourers. This recognition led to adoption in 1930 of the ILO's Forced Labour Convention (No. 29).

Following the creation of the United Nations, the ILO with the participation of other parts of the UN system created the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention (No. 107). Convention No. 107 was adopted in 1957 as the first international treaty on this subject.