' ' - . •·-··- by· Hor;iuon cw,C, St<ml�y J, G't•n�r .. t�•. .. � � ,f • ' ' ' •• ' ,.. ' ' . ,, vo·· ' · . Jwn . - ' _: ,.,_ · i ., "',' � . •- 1• 0 AAW 1t'.fAl ��• �fhlS ANN _ .• ..__ ·<- . , ._ i:,I l''•tfift , _ -)__ ,, .,_.. .-·-.._• ,. - �- • fNQUSTR:fAt. WA$?! ,_,, • • ' • . J.; • . •, ' •• cl. ;;. .._.,, .,,' ) -�"' . ) ,;_ . '," ,.,,..,l . •--.-. ,i : .. ,.. .,. EXCAVATIONS OF THE PREHISTORIC IRON INDUSTRY IN WEST BORNEO Volume One Raw Materials and Industrial Waste .. • • 1 • ··-�••·.• · •• . ��- @ t)., • 1 .. Plate 1. "Batu Gambar." Rock Carving Located at Jaong (Chapter V.32.a). 1.1. EXCAVATIONS OF THE PREHISTORIC IRON INDUSTRY IN WEST BORNEO by Tom Harrisson and Stanley J. O'Connor Volume One RAW MATERIALS AND INDUSTRIAL WASTE Dati Paper: Number 72 Southeast Asia Program Department of Asian Studies Cornell University, ·rthaca, New York April, 1969 Price: $5.00 Set ( © 1969 CORNELL UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM First Printing 1969 Second Printing 1972 The field work upon which this Data Paper is based was primarily funded by the Sarawak Government while one of the authors, Tom Harrisson, was Curator, Sarawak Museum, 1947-66. Full acknowledgment is made to the Government and to the present Curator of the Sarawak Museum. THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM The Southeast Asia Program was organized at Cornell University in the Department of Far Eastern Studies in 1950. It is a teaching and research program of interdisciplinarya. studies in the humanities, social sciences and some natural sciences. It deals with Southeast Asia as a region, and with the individual countries of the area: Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The activities of the Program are carried on both at Cornell and in Southeast Asia. They include an undergraduate and graduate curriculum at Cornell which provides instruction by specialists in Southeast Asian cultural history and present-day affairs and offers intensive training in each of the major languages of the area. The Program sponsors group research projects on Thailand, on Indonesia, on the Phi·lippines, and on the area's Chinese minorities. At the same time, individual staff and students of the Program have done field research in ev�ry Southeast Asian country. A list of publications relating to Southeast Asia which may be obtained on prepaid order directly from the Program is given at the end of Volume Two. Information on Program staff, fellowships, requirements for degrees, and current course offerings will be found in an Announcement of the Department of Asian Studies, obtainable from the Director, Sout�east Asia Program, Franklin Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York l4850. V ° ° ° 95 105 115 ° 125 30°-+--------=---,-,-- ° G.',.-�\\_�,.,,.,.,..,.'r'----------....__:_.;.,.:;,,'.?(:/·. ___ __,.....,.,....,,_--�30 NTUBON . ..... SA ····· 1. Sungti]aong . ·. ·:: :_)/:_}:·:,· (}\\ 2. BongkisSllm .· :;f:':°::. -_.::�·g: \JI.., Maras. � J (:i/:�:: CH IN A 3 Bukil -·_:-i/:::,._.--,.-,:,\ �:• /:;·,,.-::;):- 4:Sungti Buah)>�-: . ....,�4 ·. 1 ' 5. Tanjong Kubor ( /..-... 6.- Tmijonggo Tt k ?, ChuanChou ° n ° 20 20 . ...... SIAM . ....... : .·: ::.. .....·· ·...:·-/. ·..,.•. ' ·:·.. : ° 10 .·.·.· ··.·.·:··.... .. ....... ':'!(\:_\·::. 0 500 ° __;_; 10 +---------.....----------....--° _;_;_���.:.............,;,,,;,;,.L,--4- 950 • 105 115° 125 ° Plate 2. Principal Sites in Santubong Area, after Ch�ng, Archaeology in Sarawak . V1• "The sail up the (Sarawak) river, our first sight of the country and the people, was indeed exciting, and filled us with delight. The river winds continually, and every new reach has its interest: a village of palm-leaf houses built close to the water, women and children standing on the steps with long ·bamboo jars ...boats of all sizes near the houses, fishing-nets hang­ ing up to dry, wicked alligators lying basking on the mud; trees of many varieties--the nibong palm which furnishes the posts of the houses, the nipah which make their mat walls, and close by the water the light and graceful mangroves, which at night are all alive and glittering with fire-flies." Harriette McDougall, Sketches of Our Life in Sarawak, 1890, p. 15. "The ground then lies fallow eight or ten years, and becomes covered with banboos and shrubs, which often completely arch over the path and shut out everything from the view. Three hours walk­ ing brought us to the village of Senankan, where I was again o­ bliged to remain -the whole day, which I -agreed to do on the prom­ ise of the Orang Kaya that his men should next day take me through two other villages across to Senna, at the head of the Sarawak River. I amused myself as best I could till evening, by walking about the high ground near, to get views of the country and bear­ ings of the chief mountains. There was then another public audi­ ence with gifts of rice and eggs, and drinking of rice wine. These Dayaks cultivate a great extent of ground and supply a good deal of rice to Sarawak. They are rich in gongs, brass trays, wire, silver coins, and other articles in which a Dayak's wealth consists; and their women and children are highly ornamented with bead necklaces, shells and brass wire..n .. After crossing the Kayan River, a main branch of the Sadong, we got on to the lower slopes of the Seboran Mountain, and the path lay along a sharp and moderately steep ridge, affording an excellent view of the country. Its features were exactly those of the Himalajas in miniature, as they are described by Dr. Hooker and other travel­ lers; and looked like a natural model of some parts of thosevast mountains on a scale of about a tenth, thousands of feet being here represented by hundreds. I now discovered the source of the beautiful pebbles which had so pleased me in the river-bed. The slaty rocks had ceased, and these mountains seemed to consist of a sand-stone conglomerate, which was in some places a mere mass of pebbles cemented together. I might have known that such small streams could not produce such vast quantities of well-rounded pebbles of the very hardest materials. They had evidently been formed in past ages, by the action of some continental stream or seabeach, before the great island of Bo.rneo had risen from the ocean. The existence of such a system ·of hills· and valleys repro· ducing in miniature all the features of a great mountain region, has an important bearing on the modern theory, that the form of the ground is mainly due to atmospheric rather than to subterran­ ean action·." A. R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, 1869 . Vll PREFACE The present text is part of a much wider study �n the prehistoric open-sites of the Sarawak River delta around Santubong in southwest Borneo. These sites were first seri­ ously noted by H. H. Everett in 1909, first systematically explored and excavated from 1947 onwards by one of us-as Curator of the Sarawak Museum (1947-1966). We are now work­ ing on a full-length report at Cornell University; the provi­ sional Contents Sheet for this forms Appendix D here, thus enabling the reader to see this particular material in itst· more general setting, as the first two·in a series of volumes projected. An earlier paper has reported separately on one special feature, a "Tantric Bud.dhist" shrine with associated gold and other jewelry at Santubong (s·ee Basic References on. page xi). For a scholarly andt·twe11-written general survey of the delta and its importance, there is Dr. Cheng Te-K'un's Archaeology in Sarawak (Cambridge, 1968) which in part is based on sections of the draft report loaned to him, although the views he expresses are his own--and tend to lay a greater emphasis on the Chinese role that we might do on the exist­ ing information (cf. Appendix A for discussion). The feature of the delta sites which is least immedi-. ately pleasing to the archaeologist, yet in several respects the most significant to an understanding of Southeast Asian pre-history, is the massive evidence of large-scale iron­ working starting around a thousand years ago and now lying submerged in the mangrove swamps, rubber gardens and durian orchards of Bongkisam (a part of Santubong village), Sungei Jaong (now a tiny uninhabited creek a mile and a half up­ stream on the right bank), Sungei Buah (likewise two miles up on the left bank) and elsewhere scattered over an arc of 40-50 miles behind the South China Sea coast on the wide bay of Santubong. This activity in Iron is the subject of the present paper. In making this presentation we emphasize that this is a Data Paper, in the strict sense of this series. It aims to present the basic data on that part of the Sarawak River delta study which relates to prehistoric iron-working, on the basis of the material available to us at the time of writing. We believe some new points emerge from these data directly. But we are also well aware that the study so far raises about as many questions as it answers--maybe more. The paper is thus a starting point for more and much needed further research. 1X In particular, there is a clear need for more exact and analytical study of the iron slags, ores, local clays, cru­ cible and/or tuyere (nozzles) of clay, including sophisti­ cated laboratory tests, microphotography, X-ray and other examination. These may well require significant revision or extension of the present text. Now that this text is com­ plete and in circulation, such further research becomes practicable. At the same time, _this paper is offered in the hope that it will suggest some research goals and subsidiary methods hitherto perhaps somewhat underestimated in Southeast Asia especially. The tendency has been to ignore some of the problems here discussed, in favor of more tractable and aesthetically attractive aspects, such as stoneware and glass, iconography and epigraphy; and--further back in time --tool and other typologies for the late (neolithic) stone age out of which this iron grew, indeed e�ploded.