Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia, Volume 18

Quaternary Research In Indonesia

Susan G. Keates, Juliette M. Pasveer

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000722826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Civil Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Written for researchers, university lecturers and advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in all fields of archaeological and anthropological study, this collection features new research from different excavation sites around Indonesia together with pioneering expert analysis. Groundbreaking new theories on early colonization feature alongside a thorough and up-to-date examination of field methods and techniques, and valuable insight into human development in Indonesia and beyond.

Focused on Java and Sulawesi, these research findings highlight important recent advances in quaternary research. Results from a cave excavation in Southern Java provide a much-needed long-term palaeoclimatic record, based on a lowland pollen sequence from Central Java, while the contributions from South Sulawesi include a pioneering archaeobotanical analysis, a new hypothesis on the earliest human colonisation of this island, and an attempt to reconstruct preceramic human biological population affinities. In addition, the little-known archaeology of the tiny island of Roti is presented and discussed here, with particular attention on prehistoric survival in an impoverished island environment.

1. Quaternary research in Indonesia: Introduction

SUSAN G. KEATES

Institute of Biological Anthropology, University of Oxford, U.K.

JULIETTE M. PASVEER

Department of Archaeology and Natural History, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Readers of this volume of Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia can appreciate some of the recent advances made in Quaternary research in Indonesia. The papers in this volume include excavation reports on some well-known and some new Indonesian archaeological sites, as well as detailed analyses of lithic and bone artefacts and faunal, botanical and human remains, and several more general reviews that place these studies in broader context.

Most papers in the volume describe discoveries on the islands of Java or Sulawesi, with fewer contributions on the archaeology of the Lesser Sundas and the Moluccas. Although this bias certainly does not do justice to the important archaeological research carried out in recent years on other Indonesian islands such as Flores and Timor (e.g. Morwood et al. 1998; Morwood 2001; O’Connor et al. 2002), the narrower geographic foci are consistent with the history of the volume, which was first conceived by the former editor, Dr Gert-Jan Bartstra, as a volume devoted to Sulawesian archaeology. In bringing this thought into material form, the current editors have seen merit in expanding the original concept to accommodate the two geographic areas in which Bartstra played such an active and influential role throughout his professional career – Java and Sulawesi.

Java is in many respects the true cradle of Indonesian archaeology. This is not only on account of Eugène F.T. Dubois’ oft-recounted discovery in the banks of the Solo River of the first truly ancient human fossils from anywhere in the world, but also because so many of the dominant figures of Indonesian archaeology, Bartstra included, can be said to have ‘cut their teeth’ in the island’s prehistory. In Bartstra’s case, his early researches into the Solo and Baksoka river terraces, the latter with their famous ‘Pacitanian’ stone artefacts, can be said to mark the birth of modem multidisciplinary studies of these complex landscapes with their rich record of human history.

Central and East Java have been an important focus of Quaternary research since Dubois’ discoveries. Knowledge of the stratigraphy, chronology and palaeobiology of the Sangiran Dome, scene of much important research into the life of Homo erectus, is advanced in this volume through a detailed report by Anne-Marie Moigne and her coworkers on Middle Pleistocene fossil cervids from the Ngebung site. The fossils were excavated under well-controlled circumstances in the early 1990s by a French-Indonesian team and provide a firm basis for comparison with earlier samples from the region, such as the famous Trinil collection. The authors of this paper propose a taxonomic distinction for the Ngebung fossils of the genus Axis lydekkeri. The common presence of this new subspecies points to a close relationship between the Ngebung collection and the Trinil faunal association.

Dubois’ discoveries at Trinil naturally overshadowed some of his earlier contributions to Indonesian archaeology. Dubois had begun his quest for early hominids in the caves of Sumatra, but relocated his searches for ancient humans to eastern Java in 1890, shortly after learning of the discovery of a human skull from a cave at Wajak. He excavated many more fossils at Wajak, including another hominid skull, and identified the skulls as representatives of a ‘Proto-Australian’ stock with Homo sapiens. The Wajak fossils were studied anew in the mid-1990s (Storm 1995), with preliminary information provided at that time on some new radiocarbon dates. In this volume, Richard Shutler Jr. and colleagues provide full details of AMS radiocarbon dates on bone apatite from a human femur from Wajak, which places this fossil securely in the early Holocene. In contrast, the ‘associated’ fauna from Wajak appears to be older than the human femur, probably by around 4,000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years. The preservation of the two Wajak skulls was found to be unsuitable for AMS dating. The age of these important human fossils may be determined in future, perhaps by another method.

Research into the richly fossiliferous fluvial deposits of Central and East Java might also be said to have detracted from the progress of cave archaeology in Java. If so, Truman Simanjuntak’s paper in this volume removes forever any notion of Javan cave archaeology as a poor second cousin. He provides a clear and informative synthesis of recent studies in the Gunung Sewu (Thousand Mountains’) region in southern Java, a heavily karstified area that presents an almost overwhelming richness of archaeological remains. An intensive programme of archaeological research was initiated in the Gunung Sewu in early 1990 by the Centre for Archaeological Research in Jakarta, and continued with subsequent collaboration with the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and the University of Auckland. Simanjuntak describes numerous, spectacular cave and rockshelter sites with deep, stratified deposits and excellent organic preservation, and massive open sites littered with cultural remains. His review is focused on the chronology of habitation through the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, and the major cultural developments through this period. However, he also alludes to the much longer time depth now coming from the region, with the earliest signs of human presence dating back to around 180,000 BP.

Francois Sémah and colleagues provide a detailed progress report on their ongoing studies at the important site of Song Terns in the Gunung Sewu. They start by describing their approach to establishing the age of the Gunung Sewu karst. This line of investigation dated the genesis of cave formation in the Thousand Mountains back to at least the Middle Pleistocene, a period when Homo erectus surely still roamed on Java. Encouraged by this finding, the team looked for deep cave deposits that might contain stratified evidence of early human activity. In this volume, they summarise the geomorphic and cultural stratigraphy of the Song Terns cave, a remarkable site that has produced evidence, albeit from a river-laid deposit in the cave, of human activity dating back to some 200,000 years ago. As emphasised additionally by Simanjuntak, the absence in Song Terus of artefacts that are convincingly Pacitanian in feel, might point to an even earlier age for this industry, perhaps back in the Middle Pleistocene. The ongoing excavations in Song Terus and in other caves of the Gunung Sewu perhaps will shed light on this important question in the near future. Archaeological research on Java, despite its long pedigree, in very many respects, remains in its infancy.

In the past three decades, archaeological studies in Indonesia have been augmented by the results of detailed palynological research. Anne-Marie Sémah and her colleagues present in this volume their research of the palaeoclimatic record of the Ambarawa Basin in Central Java, some 100 km northwest of the Gunung Sewu area. The Ambarawa Basin is located at 460 m altitude and presents therefore a much-needed continuous and chronologically controlled lowland sequence for this region. This record spans the last 20,000 years or so and thus covers a period from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present.

Sulawesi presents many of the same archaeological ingredients as Java – thick, fossiliferous alluvial sequences, artefacts seemingly associated with the remains of Stegodon and other Pleistocene fauna, and karstic landscapes with numerous caves and rich archaeological deposits. These characteristics captured the interest of several of the pioneers of Indonesian archaeology, including Hendrik Robert Van Heekeren and Pieter Vincent van Stein Callenfels. Bartstra, too, was drawn to Sulawesi where he worked on the alluvial terrace deposits of the Walanae River valley.

Susan Keates’ contribution to this volume presents a broad synthesis of the Late Pleistocene archaeology of Island Southeast Asia. Her starting point is the Walanae valley area of southwest Sulawesi, where flaked lithics recovered during extensive fieldwork by Bartstra and colleagues are placed in a geomorphic context of multiple alluvial terrace levels. Although the chronology of the Walanae deposits is not yet anchored by radiometric dates, the stratigraphic evidence points to a considerable time depth within the sequence and the possibility that artefacts from the upper terrace levels were manufactured by the earliest human colonisers of Sulawesi. Keates next reviews the evidence for the late survival of H. erectus on Java, as exemplified by the important Ngandong locality. While the chronological status of this locality has not been solved, Ngandong remains critical to understanding how modem humans first colonised Island Southeast Asia and Australia. In this respect, the older presence of modern humans in Australia appears anomalous. Keates’ review poses many questions regarding the pattern and process of prehistoric human migrations in the Indonesian region, both on and off the Sahul shelf.

Chronological evidence of human presence in Sulawesi comes almost exclusively from cave excavations. David Bulbeck, Iwan Sumantri and Peter Hiscock report radiometric dates and lithic artefacts, fire use and animal remains from the recently excavated site Leang Sakapao 1 in the Maros region of South Sulawesi. The conventional radiocarbon dates point to human activities at this rockshelter between about 30,000 to 20,000 years ago, and are, with the approximately contemporaneous Leang Burung 2, the earliest absolutely dated evidence for human occupation of Sulawesi. These authors propose a two-stage colonisation model, and explain the lack of earlier evidence of human activity at these two inland sites as a consequence of initial adaptation of the first colonists to the coast only. Bulbeck et al. further suggest that the reduced level of activity in the Maros sites during the Last Glacial Maximum could signal an economic shift to the coast provided by an increase in coastal habitat and its resources. Occupation of the earliest humans to the coast only would perhaps indicate a very low hunter-gatherer population density for pre-30,000-year Sulawesi. However, since much of Sulawesi remains unexplored archaeologically, future studies with careful radiometric age determinations might well reveal earlier settlement of the inland.

In a major contribution dealing with the Holocene prehistory of South Sulawesi, David Bulbeck examines the cultural, socio-economic and linguistic relationships with reference to the lithic, ceramic, parietal art and more recent artefact sequence. These materials derive from the Leang-Leang (Maros) and south coast rockshelters and his own survey of 68 open-air sites in the peninsula. The survey showed, for example, that lithic artefacts are most abundant on old landforms, which, consistent with rockshelter data, could indicate higher than usual hunter-gatherer densities. Bulbeck notes geographic and ecological differences between the Toalean southwest and the non-Toalean north of the peninsula, where so far the earliest human occupation dates to the late Holocene with some evidence of ties to the Neolithic of Taiwan or Vietnam. The northeast shares some cultural characteristics with the southwest. However, there are indications of smaller human populations, based on a low density of flaked lithics found during a survey and the nature of the Bola Batu fauna that points to widespread primary forest. Bulbeck’s synthesis also addresses the question of Austronesian colonisation of Sulawesi.

David Bulbeck’s second paper in the volume reviews the morphology and population affinities of human skeletal remains from South Sulawesi, most of which date to the Holocene. This analysis is linked directly with his contribution on Holocene prehistory. One of his findings is that all or most of the remains classified as representative of Toalean, i.e. preceramic populations, can with the exception of very few individuals, be attributed to a post-Toalean origin. The fragmentary nature of the vast majority of human remains from Sulawesi poses special difficulties for analysis of population affinities. Bulbeck’s careful and detailed comparative analyses of metric and non-metric dental and cranial traits indicates that the small sample of genuinely Toalean remains are more closely related to Ainu and/or Jomon and, to a lesser degree, to Melanesian populations, than to those of late prehistoric South Sulawesi. It is interesting though, the small size of Toalean teeth is in marked contrast to Australian dental dimensions, a finding that runs counter to the idea of a prehistoric Toalean connection between Sulawesi and Australia.

Two papers in the volume are concerned with prehistoric exploitation of natural resources in Sulawesi. Allison Simons and David Bulbeck present their analysis of faunal assemblages from 13 rockshelters in the Maros region, the southern coast, and the mountainous inland. The authors establish a chronology for the southwest peninsula’s fauna based on biostratigraphic, radiocarbon and lithic-typological data. Comparisons between near-coastal and inland rockshelters indicate several patterns of faunal resource exploitation and changes from the Late Pleistocene to the late Holocene. In the Leang Burung 2 area, people may have resorted to hunting pigs when two other large endemic mammals, Babyroussa babyrussa and Anoa sp., became reduced and exterminated, possibly through excessive hunting. Humans appear to have had a slower impact on the large indigenous fauna of the highland interior, thus indicating differences in lowland and highland settlement patterns.

The contribution by Victor Paz in this volume describes the Holocene archaeobotanical specimens from Leang Burung 1 in South Sulawesi. However, in broader terms, it represents a major illustration of how the study of macro-botanical remains can contribute to archaeological studies in Island Southeast Asia. Paz introduces a recording system for botanical materials that can serve as a guide for future studies of plant remains from this region. One of Paz’s major research findings is the lack of domesticated plants in association with pottery use at Leang Burung 1. Similar findings have also been made in northeast Asia.

The importance of organic remains is further illustrated by the contribution of Sandra Olsen and Ian Glover on the manufacture and use of bone and antler tools in Island and Mainland Southeast Asia. These tools are documented from Late Pleistocene contexts onwards, but become more common in the latest Pleistocene and Holocene. Most specimens derive from caves or rockshelters, and while this may be due to poor preservation of such tools in open sites, this explanation does not explain their scarcity in shell-middens. The main body of Olsen and Glovers’ paper is a technical study of the bone tools from Toalean levels in the Ulu Leang 1 and Leang Burung 1 rockshelters in the Maros region of South Sulawesi. Their research includes microscopic analysis and experimental replication of use wear. One of the results of their study is that no standardisation in point and awl manufacture is evident. Olsen and Glover, in common with some earlier authors, see a possible connection between Sulawesi and Australia in the similarity of bone points and some types of lithic artefacts.

A second paper on bone artefacts, by Juliette Pasveer and Peter Bellwood, provides an analysis of specimens from sites excavated by Bellwood and colleagues in the 1990s in the northern Moluccas. Although these sites span the last 35,000 years, the bone tools are mostly of mid-to late Holocene age. The paper presents a detailed description of the morphology and patterns of use wear on the artefacts. Contrary to the findings of Olsen and Glover, the pattern of use wear in the Moluccan assemblages is closely associated with artefact ‘type’, the mode of production of which also seems to be fairly standardised. Although these observations do not lead to a straightforward functional interpretation for bone tools, Pasveer and Bellwood review a range of possible functions, based on ethnographic analogues, and are able to test and reject some of the generally accepted views regarding the use of these tools. Their studies also lead to some important conclusions regarding the types of activities carried out at each of the sites.

Returning to Sulawesi, Caldwell and Lillie examine historical claims of a large, permanent lake in the Tempe depression of southwest Sulawesi. To examine the veracity of these accounts, they conducted geomorphological studies to reconstruct the Holocene landscape in this area. By combining previous bore-hole surveys and chronostratigraphic and palaeoenvironmental data of Lake Rawa Lampulung and Lake Tempe with their own surveys of these lakes, they conclude that seasonal expansion of three lakes caused by flooding appears to have been responsible for the ‘tales’ of a single, huge lake. Caldwell and Lillie also set out plans for more detailed research on the impacts of sea level fluctuations in the Holocene, in particular the possibility of a water-way connecting the east and west coasts of southwest Sulawesi.

The final paper in the volume concerns recent archaeological research on the tiny island of Roti, off the southwestern tip of Timor. Mahirta, a student of Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, excavated in the late 1990s at the Late Pleistocene site of Pia Hudale. The results of her own studies and successful collaboration with a team of specialists, are reported in this volume. The site is particularly interesting as virtually nothing is currently known of the Quaternary history of the smaller islands of Nusa Tenggara (the Lesser Sundas). Today, many of the smaller islands are remarkably poor in natural resources, with little or no remnant natural vegetation and with impoverished vertebrate faunas. The faunal analysis from Pia Hudale indeed suggests that people lived predominantly on rats and fruitbats, probably because there was not much else to eat. A noteworthy finding is the absence of giant rats in the Pia Hudale deposit, contrasting with rockshelter deposits on Timor and Flores.

The first volume of Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia was dedicated to the late Dr H.R. van Heekeren, who died shortly after participating in a symposium on Indonesian archaeology. As outlined in the preface of that memorable volume, it was Van Heekeren’s dream to see Quaternary research in this region flourish through the application of multidisciplinary studies. This ideal was subsequently championed and realised by the first editors of Modern Quaternary Research in Southeast Asia, Gert-Jan Bartstra and Willem Casparie, with subsequent volumes containing a broad mix of articles that span many disciplines.

Gert-Jan Bartstra began his research in Indonesia in 1970 when, as a student, he participated in the Joint Indonesian-Dutch Sulawesi Prehistoric Expedition. This expedition was co-led by Van Heekeren and carried out a survey of Bern in the Walanae River area of South Sulawesi, an area to which Bartstra was to return in subsequent years. Early in his career, Bartstra recognised that the key to advancing our knowledge and understanding of Indonesian prehistory is careful and meticulous geomorphological studies of the deposits in which fossils and artefacts are found. During the 1970s, he carried out the first excavations of the Baksoka River deposits in southern Java, where tools classified as Pacitanian were first recognised in the 1930s by G.H. Ralph von Koenigswald. Largely based on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Quaternary research in Indonesia: Introduction
• 2 New insight on the prehistoric chronology of Gunung Sewu, Java, Indonesia
• 3 The cervids from the Ngebung site (‘Kabuh’ series, Sangiran Dome, Central Java) and their biostratigraphical significance
• 4 The significance of the Punung karstic area (eastern Java) for the chronology of the Javanese Palaeolithic, with special reference to the Song Terus cave
• 5 A Late Pleistocene and Holocene sedimentary record in Central Java and its palaeoclimatic significance
• 6 AMS radiocarbon dates on bone from cave sites in southeast Java, Indonesia, including Wajak
• 7 Notes on the Palaeolithic finds from the Walanae valley, southwest Sulawesi, in the context of the Late Pleistocene of Island Southeast Asia
• 8 Leang Sakapao 1, a second dated Pleistocene site from South Sulawesi, Indonesia
• 9 Divided in space, united in time: The Holocene prehistory of South Sulawesi
• 10 Late Quaternary faunal successions in South Sulawesi, Indonesia
• 11 Of nuts, seeds and tubers: The archaeobotanical evidence from Leang Burung 1
• 12 South Sulawesi in the corridor of island populations along East Asia’s Pacific rim
• 13 Manuel Pinto’s inland sea: Using palaeoenvironmental techniques to assess historical evidence from southwest Sulawesi
• 14 The bone industry of Ulu Leang 1 and Leang Burung 1 rockshelters, Sulawesi, Indonesia, in its regional context
• 15 Prehistoric bone artefacts from the northern Moluccas, Indonesia
• 16 Pia Hudale Rockshelter: A terminal Pleistocene occupation site on Roti Island, Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia