Reconstructing the peopling of the deep interior of the equatorial rainforest of Kalimantan

Summary

Previous archaeological discoveries by Soejono (1977) and Chazine (2010) at Nanga Balang and Diang Kaung in the deep interior of Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have documented human occupation there at c. 3000 BP. But sites closer to the coastline of Borneo, especially the Niah Caves in Sarawak, have yielded chronologies indicating a much greater span of late Pleistocene (50 Kya onwards) to Holocene occupation. So, did hunter-gatherer populations also exist in the deep interior of Borneo throughout the same period? Were they present prior to 3000 BP? My two seasons of excavation (2013-2014) in two caves in the upper Kapuas Basin indicate at least 6 different periods of activity, ranging in date (14 charcoal samples) from 15 cal. Kya to recent. Recovered materials include pebble and flake tools, pottery, iron artifacts, marine cowry shells, glass and shell beads, human bones, and a quantity of rice husk. Today, this region is exploited occasionally by Punan hunters and swiddeners, but has no permanent settlement. These new chronologies for human occupation of deep interior equatorial rainforest are significant for the “rainforest debate” of the late 1980-1990s, and confirm the importance of interior Borneo within the prehistory of Indonesia and Island Southeast Asia.

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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