Indonesia Peoples and Histories by Jelman Gelman Taylor

EARLY BEGINNINGS
Histories Through Material Culture

In the beginning there was no Indonesia. Land bridges connected the islands
of Java, Sumatra, and Borneo to the Eurasian land mass. Bones discovered
in the Solo valley are the only clue that ancestors lived 1.5 million years
ago in Java. Human society reveals itself faintly from around 40,000. Descendants of early communities today live on the fringes of the Indonesian archipelago,
in New Guinea, on the Melanesian islands, in Australia, and in the
highlands of the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines. Until recent times they
were tropical forest hunters, gatherers of tubers, and producers of flaked stone
tools. In the Indonesian islands they were absorbed or displaced by peoples who
entered the islands after their separation from the Asian mainland. The oldest
sites in this island world where human remains, manufactured objects, and evidence
of agriculture have been found together date to the sixth century ...
Older books speak of waves of migrations, evoking a powerful but misleading
image of people gathering at fixed points on Asia’s mainland to head to
known destinations in lands to the south: this way to Vietnam; that way to
Java. The variations observable among Indonesians today are not the result of
separate migrations by different races. They are the product of a long, slow expansion within the archipelago of one ethnolinguistic group whose members
adapted to various locales, mixed with existing communities, and responded
in different ways and times to the influences of external civilizations. Today’s
Early Kingdoms in the Western Archipelago
large populations of the archipelago share a common origin in southern China
and speak a great variety of languages in the Austronesian family.
Around 4000, along the marshy coasts of China between the Yangzi
Delta and South Fujian, pockets of peoples grew rice, had domesticated pigs
and chickens, and made clay pots to store and boil grain. They used waterways
as their footpaths, maneuvering small, flat-bottomed boats along rivers and
among coastal sandbars. From around 3000. specialists worked in metal.
By 1000, communities along the coasts of mainland Southeast Asia were
raising rice in the flood areas of rivers, making pottery and stone tools, mining
metal ores and casting objects in bronze. One theory endorsed by Pluvier
places the origins of today’s Indonesians in these settlements. Over generations,
farmers of land and sea edged south from China, eventually moving into
the Malay Peninsula and from there into the archipelago.
Bellwood argues that migrations into island Southeast Asia were by sea
routes. South China coastal peoples sailed to the western shores of Taiwan,
where they cultivated rice in swampland, passed on techniques of pottery
making and spinning to their children, produced adzes with beveled edges,
and put buffaloes to domestic use. Above all, they remained adept on water.
To seafaring people, knowledgeable about wind and ocean, tree felling, and
construction of boats, the South China Sea yielded islands and shores that reproduced
a familiar habitat. Mangrove coasts abounded in fish and turtles,
riverbanks gave shelter from storms of the open seas, forested lowlands produced
woods and rattans for boats and huts, and cliff caves for shelter. Wind
and water currents carried travelers to island stepping-stones in the sea. They
reached the northern Philippine Islands by 3000, the islands of eastern
Indonesia and Borneo by around 2000, and New Guinea, Java, and
Sumatra between 1500 and 1000.
The evidence for migration along sea routes is linguistic. The languages
spoken today in a region stretching from Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia,
and Malaysia to the Cham-speaking areas of Vietnam are related and are distinct
from languages spoken on the mainland.
Within the Indonesian archipelago, groups spread along shores and up
rivers, engulfing the pre-Austronesian hunter-gatherers. The lives of Austronesian-
speaking communities in the oldest settlements are known only from evidence
yielded by excavated sites, for this era in Indonesian histories is without
writing. The boat was house, vehicle, and site of production. Estuaries, rivers,
lakes, and coasts provided regular supplies of food year round, so that groups
who farmed Indonesian waters established land settlements to support their
life on the water and divided their labor between land and sea. In fishing com-
munities of the past few hundred years, for which there are written records,
there is a division of labor by age and gender. Men caught near-shore varieties
of fish with spears and nets; they selected and cut timbers to build and sail
boats for deep-sea fishing; they hunted turtles and dived for mother-of-pearl;
they mended fishing nets. Women and children gathered shellfish from the
beds near seashores and reefs; they worked on boat and on shore; they preserved
and stored marine foods for land use and sea journeys by drying them
in the sun, smoking them over fire, boiling, or salting.
Hunting by boat and settling on shore allowed communities to venture
into the forested coastline, plains, and hill slopes for food and building materials.
In their long expansion through the islands of the archipelago, Austronesians
relied on tubers growing in the floor of rain forests, gathered fruits, and
hunted wild pigs. In the rain-soaked islands of the eastern archipelago, they
harvested the sago palm for food and construction materials. Some archipelago
communities in drier regions, using axes and fire, cleared small patches of
the rain forest’s dense undergrowth to broadcast seeds of rice and root vegetables.
They hunted in the tangle of vegetation hemming their plots, and gathered
plants growing wild, before moving on to clear another plot. Some groups
adapted to inland waterways, sowing seeds along rivers whose soils were enriched
by water periodically rising and flooding the banks. Other groups followed
rivers upstream to settle in fertile mountain valleys and raise rice.

RICE
Rice is a staple for all classes in Indonesia today, but it has been incorporated
into Indonesian diets only as people acquired the technology
to grow it or were able to buy rice raised elsewhere. Remains of
wild rice date from 3,000. in Sulawesi. Evidence for rice cultivation
comes much later from Java, where eighth-century. stone inscriptions
record that kings levied taxes in rice. Scenes carved into the walls of the
ninth-century Prambanan temples suggest a division of labor between
animals, men, and women that could still be seen in Java in the twentieth
century: a buffalo is harnessed to a plow; women plant seedlings in a field
and pound rice; a man carries sheaves of rice at each end of a pole laid
Many of the rivers which rise in the high mountains of Indonesia’s islands
make their way to sea down rocky cliffs, along beds strewn with huge boulders.
They crash by waterfalls to lower ravines until they reach the coastal plains.
There they divide into many branches and move sluggishly across a watery
landscape where land and sea become indistinguishable in periods of heavy
rainfall and storms, and where rivers become shallow in hot, dry spells. Such
rivers could not be used as water highways connecting high interior to coast
and sea-lanes. Travel combined paths cut through jungle and paths navigated
on water. Many groups were made remote by their upland location, by shifts in
settlement patterns of coastal peoples, by difficult terrain, and by an unequal
contention with other inhabitants of wooded areas, particularly the tigers,
wild pigs, and poisonous snakes. Long journeys were major undertakings of
resourceful and healthy men.
People in coastal settlements had sporadic contact with semi-nomad
farmers of the rain forest and with people of upland valleys, and more regular
contact with peoples resident along other coasts. Communities living on boat
and on land sailed within small spheres that linked into the travel circuits of
other coastal communities. In Indonesia’s histories, sea peoples have played
important roles as traders, pirates, mercenaries, and slavers; they have taken
the role of outsider, recorder, and supplier for land-bound communities. They
go by various names in written sources: sea nomads, sea gypsies, sea hunters
and gatherers, and the Indonesian term orang laut (people of the sea).
It is not knowable how many people lived on shore and on water in the
thousand years for which the evidence of settlements is from excavated -
across his shoulders. In the sixteenth century, Europeans visiting the eastern
archipelago noted that cooked rice was a new prestige food there,
served to the ruling classes at ceremonies and feasts.
Rice requires exposure to the sun to ripen. The growing of rice in
cleared fields is linked, in Indonesian histories, to the production of iron
axes for clearing sites, domestication of the water buffalo, harnessing its
strength for breaking up mud clods with iron-tipped plows, and using its
manure as fertilizer. The expansion of rice cultivation over the past fifteen
hundred years has slowly transformed Indonesian landscapes from dense
forests to permanently cleared fields and concentrated settlements.
facts. Nor can the number of forest-dwelling communities that died out from
disease, animal attacks, or wounds be known, or how quickly peoples whose
ancestral origins were in southern China competed with, displaced, or absorbed
the earlier pockets of humanity living in the archipelago’s forests. What
is known are the movements of twentieth-century inhabitants of rain forest on
Borneo. In thirty years one group of Iban people traveled through three hundred
kilometers of Sarawak forest, clearing and cultivating plots, and living off
foods raised in any one clearing for one and two years.
Before writing, Indonesian histories can be dimly grasped through the
lives of things. Objects explain how life was sustained, how humans struggled
to acquire and preserve food, how they tried to protect physical and mental
health, how they conducted their spiritual life. Objects reveal differences of
wealth and destiny between people. Things, in their area of origin, in their area
of discovery, in their construction, reveal the skills of a community at specific
times in its history. Objects provide the record of technologies, of ideas, of human
organization, of human needs and desires. They establish transport networks.
Goods, technologies, and ideas traveled along land and sea paths, carried
by people who moved outside their communities of birth, fostering
wants, desires, knowledge, and a sense of others.
Early Indonesian histories are relayed through objects made of stone and
of metal, which represent solutions people produced long ago to the practical
problems posed by Indonesian landscapes of rain forest and waterways. Stone
axes, picks, and knives extended human strength for clearing a patch of forest
to plant food crops, for felling trees to build a boat, for digging a shallow pit to
get at metal ores, for skinning an animal, or for cutting into a tree for its resin
or food starch. Polished axes, produced from stone distinctive to areas in south
Sumatra and west Java, spread to faraway communities along a myriad of overlapping
sailing circuits.
From around 500. these circuits meshed with sailing routes that took
archipelago peoples into the spheres of major civilizations developing in South
and East Asia. An ancient history of human contact, of curiosity, desire, and
recognition of the significance of new objects took place at sites where land and
sea paths joined. By the third century.The Chinese had developed smelting
techniques that allowed them to produce a metal tough enough for hoes,
axes, and the tips of wooden plows. They produced iron goods for Chinese markets
and for export overseas in big blast furnaces. In the last centuries before the
Common Era, metal goods were percolating through trade networks that extended
into the Indonesian archipelago and were becoming desired objects.
Knowledge of how to detect metal deposits and of how to mine and work
in metal also spread along archipelago seaways. Iron ores are found in soils in
west Sumatra and south Sulawesi, copper ores in Sumatran and south Java
soils, tin in the Bangka and Belitung islands, and gold in west Sumatra’s highlands
and the river banks of west Kalimantan. Extraction and working of ores
required the skills and labor of many men and women in a community: makers
of hoes, shovels, and baskets; miners; collectors and cutters of firewood,
charcoal makers for heating furnaces; metalworkers to melt and beat ores into
bars, smiths to fashion tools, weapons, and bracelets; traders to put goods
made from metal into networks of buying and selling. All depended on farmers
of sea and land for food hunted, grown, preserved, prepared, and served.
Archipelago metal industries developed at sites with ores, forest, water highway,
and sizable settlements of people.
In most of the archipelago there were no deposits of metals. Some communities
obtained bars of copper, iron, and other metals through long chains
of exchange that ultimately led to China and Japan. Technologies, artistic designs,
and items circulated among outward-oriented, seafaring communities
scattered along the coasts of Sumatra, Java, Bali, Kalimantan, and the smaller
islands of Talaud, Sumba, Sumbawa, Flores, and Selayar. Their metalworkers
made arrowheads, swords, armor, axes, knives, plowshares, and fish hooks,
urns, incense holders, and dishes, rings, and bracelets.
Metal objects for work, war, storage, and decoration were introduced into
distant regions of the archipelago by Chinese imports and by local industries.
The curved blade of the dagger called kris, made by blacksmiths in Java, was
shaped from bars of an iron-nickel alloy found only in the soils of Soroako in
Sulawesi. Iron axes and knives, produced by mining communities in Belitung
and Karimata in the western archipelago, traveled along water highways, passing
through many hands. Some ended their journey as possessions of chiefs in
settlements on the northwestern tip of New Guinea. Iron tools and weapons,
vessels and jewelry made of bronze, silver, or gold were used by communities
with developing social hierarchies of leaders, religious specialists, soldiers, artisans,
farmers, and traders.
For their new owners, in settlements far distant from communities which
manufactured and used metal goods, the possession of an object made from
metal might be a sign of elevated status, and the object used to display the wealth
and self-importance of a ruler. For instance, large drums made of bronze, cast by
metalworking communities in northern Vietnam between 500 and 300
,have been found in prehistoric sites in Sumatra, Java, and Bali. It is not possible
to know if the owners of these drums valued them as musical instruments
or for the beauty of their engraved surfaces. Drums were not objects to be shared
or passed on. After the death of their owners the drums were placed in their
graves. Musical instruments originating in Vietnam represent, in Indonesian societies,
wealth hoarded and wealth withdrawn from the community.
Ancient things made from stone and metal carry Indonesian histories of
belief in the infinite social distance between rulers and ruled. The makers of
stone axes in sites in Sumatra, Java, Bali, Sumbawa, and Sumba also quarried
huge stone slabs. They carved designs of animals and human heads on the
slabs, then dragged them up the slopes of hills to raise them over the graves of
their rulers. Burial sites provide evidence of a belief in the duty of ordinary
people to serve, as well as belief in a future existence for rulers with the same
privileges as they extorted on earth. Alongside the rings, bracelets, arrowheads,
and daggers found in royal graves of the archipelago are the bones of people
killed to serve bosses in their next life.