Indonesia: Peoples and Histories - Tengku Muhammad Dhani Iqbal

EARLY BEGINNINGS
munities of the past few hundred years, for which there are written records,
there is a division of labor by age and gender. Men caught near-shore varieties
of fish with spears and nets; they selected and cut timbers to build and sail
boats for deep-sea fishing; they hunted turtles and dived for mother-of-pearl;
they mended fishing nets. Women and children gathered shellfish from the
beds near seashores and reefs; they worked on boat and on shore; they preserved
and stored marine foods for land use and sea journeys by drying them
in the sun, smoking them over fire, boiling, or salting.
Hunting by boat and settling on shore allowed communities to venture
into the forested coastline, plains, and hill slopes for food and building materials.
In their long expansion through the islands of the archipelago, Austronesians
relied on tubers growing in the floor of rain forests, gathered fruits, and
hunted wild pigs. In the rain-soaked islands of the eastern archipelago, they
harvested the sago palm for food and construction materials. Some archipelago
communities in drier regions, using axes and fire, cleared small patches of
the rain forest’s dense undergrowth to broadcast seeds of rice and root vegetables.
They hunted in the tangle of vegetation hemming their plots, and gathered
plants growing wild, before moving on to clear another plot. Some groups
adapted to inland waterways, sowing seeds along rivers whose soils were enriched
by water periodically rising and flooding the banks. Other groups followed
rivers upstream to settle in fertile mountain valleys and raise rice.
RICE
Rice is a staple for all classes in Indonesia today, but it has been incorporated
into Indonesian diets only as people acquired the technology
to grow it or were able to buy rice raised elsewhere. Remains of
wild rice date from 3,000 b.c.e. in Sulawesi. Evidence for rice cultivation
comes much later from Java, where eighth-century c.e. stone inscriptions
record that kings levied taxes in rice. Scenes carved into the walls of the
ninth-century Prambanan temples suggest a division of labor between
animals, men, and women that could still be seen in Java in the twentieth
century: a buffalo is harnessed to a plow; women plant seedlings in a field
and pound rice; a man carries sheaves of rice at each end of a pole laid
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