The Archaeology Of Sulawesi

The central Indonesian island of Sulawesi has recently been hitting headlines with respect to its archaeology. It contains some of the oldest directly dated rock art in the world, and some of the oldest evidence for a hominin presence beyond the southeastern limits of the Ice Age Asian continent. In this volume, scholars from Indonesia and Australia come together to present their research findings and views on a broad range of topics. From early periods, these include observations on Ice Age climate, life in caves and open sites, rock art, and the animals that humans exploited and lived alongside. The archaeology presented from later periods covers the rise of the Bugis kingdom, Chinese trade ceramics, and a range of site-based and regional topics from the Neolithic through to the arrival of Islam. This carefully edited volume is the first to be devoted entirely to the archaeology of the island of Sulawesi, and it lays down a baseline for significant future research. Peter Bellwood Emeritus Professor The Australian National University

The period 1200-1600 CE saw a radical transformation from simple chiefdoms to kingdoms (in archaeological terminology, complex chiefdoms) across lowland South Sulawesi, a region that lay outside the ‘classical’ Indicized parts of Southeast Asia. The rise of these kingdoms was stimulated and economically supported by trade in prestige goods with other parts of island Southeast Asia, yet the development of these kingdoms was determined by indigenous, rather than imported, political and cultural precepts. Starting in the thirteenth century, the region experienced a transition from swidden cultivation to wet-rice agriculture; rice was the major product that the lowland kingdoms of South Sulawesi exchanged with archipelagic traders. Stephen Druce demonstrates this progression to political complexity by combining a range of sources and methods, including oral, textual, archaeological, linguistic and geographical information and analysis as he explores the rise and development of five South Sulawesi kingdoms, known collectively as Ajattappareng (the Lands West of the Lakes). The author also presents an inquiry into oral traditions of a historical nature in South Sulawesi. He examines their functions, their processes of transmission and transformation, their uses in writing history and their relationship to written texts. He shows that any distinction between oral and written traditions of a historical nature is largely irrelevant, and that the South Sulawesi chronicles, which can be found only for a small number of kingdoms, are not characteristic (as historians have argued) but exceptional in the corpus of indigenous South Sulawesi historical sources. The book will be of primary interest to scholars of pre-European-contact Southeast Asia, including historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and geographers, and scholars with a broader interest in oral tradition and the relationship between the oral and written registers.

This volume details how new theories and methods have recently advanced the archaeological study of initial human colonization of islands around the world, including in the southwest Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. This global perspective brings into comparison the wide variety of approaches used to study these early migrations and illuminates current debates in island archaeology. Evidence of island colonization is often difficult to find, especially in areas impacted by sea-level rise, and these essays demonstrate how researchers have tackled this and other issues. Contributors show the potential of computer simulations of voyaging in determining the range of timing and origin points that were possible in the past. They discuss how Bayesian modeling helps address uncertainties and controversies surrounding radiocarbon dating. Additionally, advances in biomolecular techniques such as ancient DNA (aDNA), paleoproteomics, analysis of human microbiota, and improved resolution in isotopic analyses are providing more refined information on the homelands of initial settlers, on individual life courses, and on population-level migrations. Islands offer rich opportunities to examine the exploratory nature of the human species, providing insights into the evolution of watercraft technologies and wayfinding, the impact of humans on their new environments, and the motivations for their journeys. The Archaeology of Island Colonization represents the innovative ways today’s archaeologists are reconstructing these unique paleolandscapes. Contributors: Nasullah Aziz | David Ball | Todd J. Braje | Richard Callaghan | John F. Cherry | Ethan Cochrane | Robert J. DiNapoli | Andrew Dugmore | Jon M. Erlandson | Scott M. Fitzpatrick | Amy E. Gusick | Derek Hamilton | Terry L. Hunt | Thomas P. Leppard | Carl P. Lipo | Jillian Maloney | Matthew F. Napolitano | Anthony Newton | Maria A. Nieves-Colón | Rintaro Ono | Adhi Agus Oktaviana | Timothy Rieth | Curtis Runnels | Magdalena M.E. Schmid | Alexander J. Smith | Harry Octavianus Sofian | Sriwigati | Jessica H. Stone | Orri Vésteinsson A volume in the series Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology, edited by Victor D. Thompson

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.

The Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology focuses on the material culture and lifeways of the peoples of prehistoric and early historic East and Southeast Asia; their origins, behavior and identities as well as their biological, linguistic and cultural differences and commonalities. Emphasis is placed upon the interpretation of material culture to illuminate and explain social processes and relationships as well as behavior, technology, patterns and mechanisms of long-term change and chronology, in addition to the intellectual history of archaeology as a discipline in this diverse region. The Handbook augments archaeologically-focused chapters contributed by regional scholars by providing histories of research and intellectual traditions, and by maintaining a broadly comparative perspective. Archaeologically-derived data are emphasized with text-based documentary information, provided to complement interpretations of material culture. The Handbook is not restricted to art historical or purely descriptive perspectives; its geographical coverage includes the modern nation-states of China, Mongolia, Far Eastern Russia, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor.