Borneo rainforest as a social artefact: insights from integrated methodologies in archaeology, ethnography, and environmental science

Summary

Borneo has a 50,000-year record of Homo sapiens’ interactions with rainforest, a history assembled by the inter-disciplinary studies of human occupation evidence in the Niah Caves on the coastal plain of Sarawak. That project involved a collaboration in particular between archaeologists and environmental scientists, with studies for example in geomorphology, palynology, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, palaeobiology, and material culture studies. More recent work by many of the same team in the interior of Borneo, in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, has combined those approaches with ethnography and anthropology to investigate recent and present-day as well as past human-rainforest interactions. What is emerging is the rainforest as a social artefact, with very different ecological histories related to people’s different ways of living together as well as how they extracted their livelihoods from the forest.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Forests of Plenty: Ethnographic and Archaeological Rainforests as Hotspots of Human Activity

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