Indonesia: Peoples and Histories - Tengku Muhammad Dhani Iqbal

EARLY BEGINNINGS
facts. Nor can the number of forest-dwelling communities that died out from
disease, animal attacks, or wounds be known, or how quickly peoples whose
ancestral origins were in southern China competed with, displaced, or absorbed
the earlier pockets of humanity living in the archipelago’s forests. What
is known are the movements of twentieth-century inhabitants of rain forest on
Borneo. In thirty years one group of Iban people traveled through three hundred
kilometers of Sarawak forest, clearing and cultivating plots, and living off
foods raised in any one clearing for one and two years.
Before writing, Indonesian histories can be dimly grasped through the
lives of things. Objects explain how life was sustained, how humans struggled
to acquire and preserve food, how they tried to protect physical and mental
health, how they conducted their spiritual life. Objects reveal differences of
wealth and destiny between people. Things, in their area of origin, in their area
of discovery, in their construction, reveal the skills of a community at specific
times in its history. Objects provide the record of technologies, of ideas, of human
organization, of human needs and desires. They establish transport networks.
Goods, technologies, and ideas traveled along land and sea paths, carried
by people who moved outside their communities of birth, fostering
wants, desires, knowledge, and a sense of others.
Early Indonesian histories are relayed through objects made of stone and
of metal, which represent solutions people produced long ago to the practical
problems posed by Indonesian landscapes of rain forest and waterways. Stone
axes, picks, and knives extended human strength for clearing a patch of forest
to plant food crops, for felling trees to build a boat, for digging a shallow pit to
get at metal ores, for skinning an animal, or for cutting into a tree for its resin
or food starch. Polished axes, produced from stone distinctive to areas in south
Sumatra and west Java, spread to faraway communities along a myriad of overlapping
sailing circuits.
From around 500 b.c.e. these circuits meshed with sailing routes that took
archipelago peoples into the spheres of major civilizations developing in South
and East Asia. An ancient history of human contact, of curiosity, desire, and
recognition of the significance of new objects took place at sites where land and
sea paths joined. By the third century b.c.e. the Chinese had developed smelting
techniques that allowed them to produce a metal tough enough for hoes,
axes, and the tips of wooden plows. They produced iron goods for Chinese markets
and for export overseas in big blast furnaces. In the last centuries before the
Common Era, metal goods were percolating through trade networks that extended
into the Indonesian archipelago and were becoming desired objects.
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