Indonesia Peoples and Histories by Jelman Gelman Taylor

GRAVES AS HISTORY
Secure disposal of the dead is common to most human societies. Ritual
burial tells us about local economies, levels of craftsmanship, patterns
of trade, and local tastes, as well as about religious and class systems.
The oldest burial sites yet found in Indonesia contain personal possessions
alongside the deceased, and sometimes also human and animal
bones. They establish a long history in the archipelago of belief in a life after
death.
Disposal of the dead in the Indonesian archipelago covers a wide
range of practices: interment of bones in pottery jars with beads (Bali,
Tangir), interment beneath great stone slabs and pillars (Sumatra, Java,
Bali), skull coffins made of stone in the shape of birds or mythological
creatures (Nias), interment with heads of slain enemies in stone houses
decorated with skulls and war scenes (Minahasa), interment under tombstones
constructed according to Muslim and Christian prescription and
designs, and cremation.
Solid monuments for the well-to-do and powerful attest to the enter Diffusion
of metalworking and of metal goods within the Indonesian
archipelago occurred because of local knowledge of the sea. Sailing techniques
were based on observation of the power of wind and water currents. Accumulated
experience produced patterns of sailing and timing of routes. Local
products carried by local sailors forged connections between archipelago settlements.
Products of the Indonesian landscape of forest and sea drew archipelago
communities into the orbits of land-based civilizations. Archipelago
sailors put forest and sea products into water-borne chains of exchange. Some
of these products ended up in distant societies with different sets of cultural requirements
and different inheritances of knowledge.

prises of stonemasons, blacksmiths, iron founders, and toolmakers. Large
blocks of stone are often the only reminder of the laborers who quarried
them and hauled them to burial sites. The decoration of graves, their motifs,
symbols, and epitaphs are evidence of other kinds of unremembered
laborers: they reveal knowledge of theology, traditions, and alphabets.
Fourteenth-century tombs from Trawulan, for instance, demonstrate the
presence in east Java of stonemasons who could chisel words in Javanese
and Arabic. Tombs from south Sulawesi bear inscriptions in Arabic and
Buginese languages and writing systems.
Time and tropical climate have erased all trace of most people in life or
death. The requirements of modern cities and of politics obliterate old
gravesites. Many markers to Dutch people who lived in Java in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, for example, have been bulldozed, and
only a few tombs are now preserved in Jakarta’s Tanah Abang cemetery.
Victims of war, pogrom, purge, and massacre have no individual markers.
Hundreds of Indonesians disappeared during the war for independence,
victims of rival armed gangs and group hysteria. Between one half
and a million people were killed in the process of changing presidents between
1965 and 1966. The bones of more lie in mass graves in Aceh,
Papua (Irian), and Timor Loro Sa’e. Rivers and the sea became graveyards
for unknown numbers in local wars at the end of Indonesia’s twentieth
century.
Pre-industrial communities far removed from each other in place, time,
and culture had many uses for resins from Indonesia’s rain forests. Archipelago
people who grew their food and lived among trees had discovered how to get a
tree’s resin by collecting in baskets the sticky liquid which exuded from a cut
made with a stone ax. They applied tree gums to glue together hefting points
and blades of knives. They used tree resins to coat and repair waterproof containers,
to seal carrying baskets, and to caulk boats to prevent leaks. They
bound the planks of rafts with forest rattan and tree gum. They burned the
damar resin in torches for interior light and for outdoor night performances.
Essential oils of resins provided incense for religious ceremonies. Other tree
saps were the source of lacquers and varnishes used to preserve and beautify
furniture, screens, and containers made of wood. Some trees had fragrant
barks used to perfume living spaces when burned. The resins and crystals produced
by pine trees that grow on mountain slopes in northwest Sumatra and
west Java were used as fungicides and fumigants and were applied to wounds
to stop bleeding.
Trees were tapped while a community farmed an area, then abandoned
when the group moved to clear and farm a new site. In large, semi-sedentary
communities, resin collection was no longer random tapping but the regular
gathering of resins, accompanied by the ownership of trees and inheritance
of them. Extraction of resins and barks required local knowledge, tools of
stone or iron, collecting baskets, and a portion of the time of people who lived
in and from the forest. Resins and barks were easy to carry on river and sea
journeys.
Land dwellers gathered resins, spices, and fragrant barks from trees. They
harvested coconuts; they planted pepper vines among native trees. (Much
later, as a result of contact with Europeans, they raised coffee and tea bushes,
tobacco vines, and rubber trees in their forests.) They hunted forest-dwelling
birds for their feathers. Indonesian peoples who lived more on sea than on land
collected the nests of cliff-dwelling birds; they hunted turtles for their shell,
dived for mother-of-pearl, fished for trepang, and extracted salt from seawater.
Sea and forest products made the archipelago important to foreigners, attracted
them to its water lanes and jungle paths, and brought in new knowledge.
Demand stimulated a change from sporadic gathering to regular cultivation
and collecting. Exchange made local men rich and employers of foreign
and local experts. Sea and forest products inserted Chinese and Indians into
Indonesian histories in centuries before the beginning of the Common Era.
These products brought Arabs into those histories from the seventh century
and Europeans from the sixteenth. Oil, a product of Indonesian land and

seabed, brought in Japanese and Americans in the twentieth. All these foreigners
introduced into Indonesian networks products of their own industries.
They spread their own technologies, systems of belief, and knowledge.
In the oldest burial site yet opened in the archipelago, glass beads of Indian
origin were found alongside objects of metal. These goods made outside
the region flowed into archipelago networks of exchange and became the coveted
possessions of a man important to his community in north Bali in the first
century. There is no reciprocal evidence from Indian or Chinese soils of the
Indonesian goods traded in exchange, for barks and birds’ nests leave no remains,
but other archaeological clues indicate that items originating in the Indonesian
archipelago were flowing back along the same shipping routes.
Feathers and ships give hints of trade and archipelago lives. Plumes from
the bird of paradise, which is native to New Guinea, are thought to be engraved
on bronze drums cast by artisans working two thousand years ago in
northern Vietnam, and so suggest a very old trade linking the easternmost part
of Indonesia with the Asian mainland. Shipwrecks of boats, determined to be
of Indonesian construction and dated to the second century, lie along
the southeast coast of India. Such remains hint at traffic in things from Indonesian
forests and seas centuries before written evidence surfaces in Chinese
documents of the fifth century.
Archipelago sailors who put in at ports along India’s southeast coast in the
centuries before the Common Era interacted with coastal settlements in similar
stages of development to their own. By the fifth century, the agrarian
Indian and Chinese states were very different from contemporary archipelago
shore settlements because of the size of populations occupying cleared landscapes
of farms, permanent villages, and factory work sites. Through taxes paid
in grain and manufactured products of metal, cloth, and ceramics, Indian and
Chinese peoples on the mainland supported city-based elites and hierarchies
of officials who developed and spread religions and other branches of knowledge.
The taxes of farmers and artisans paid for learning systems that stored information
through writing and supported specialists whose webs of contact
spread overland and by sea to other civilizations. Goods, knowledge, and technologies
from Indian and Chinese states accompanied specialists on their travels.
By the third century, the major merchant and craft communities of
India’s southeast coast had established subsidiary settlements in ports of mainland
Southeast Asia. They were Buddhists, and subjects of kingdoms in India
whose ruling classes were devotees of Hindu gods and patrons of Brahmanism (or
Brahmans).