Indonesia: Peoples and Histories - Tengku Muhammad Dhani Iqbal

EARLY BEGINNINGS
or for the beauty of their engraved surfaces. Drums were not objects to be shared
or passed on. After the death of their owners the drums were placed in their
graves. Musical instruments originating in Vietnam represent, in Indonesian societies,
wealth hoarded and wealth withdrawn from the community.
Ancient things made from stone and metal carry Indonesian histories of
belief in the infinite social distance between rulers and ruled. The makers of
stone axes in sites in Sumatra, Java, Bali, Sumbawa, and Sumba also quarried
huge stone slabs. They carved designs of animals and human heads on the
slabs, then dragged them up the slopes of hills to raise them over the graves of
their rulers. Burial sites provide evidence of a belief in the duty of ordinary
people to serve, as well as belief in a future existence for rulers with the same
privileges as they extorted on earth. Alongside the rings, bracelets, arrowheads,
and daggers found in royal graves of the archipelago are the bones of people
killed to serve bosses in their next life.
GRAVES AS HISTORY
Secure disposal of the dead is common to most human societies. Ritual
burial tells us about local economies, levels of craftsmanship, patterns
of trade, and local tastes, as well as about religious and class systems.
The oldest burial sites yet found in Indonesia contain personal possessions
alongside the deceased, and sometimes also human and animal
bones. They establish a long history in the archipelago of belief in a life after
death.
Disposal of the dead in the Indonesian archipelago covers a wide
range of practices: interment of bones in pottery jars with beads (Bali,
Tangir), interment beneath great stone slabs and pillars (Sumatra, Java,
Bali), skull coffins made of stone in the shape of birds or mythological
creatures (Nias), interment with heads of slain enemies in stone houses
decorated with skulls and war scenes (Minahasa), interment under tombstones
constructed according to Muslim and Christian prescription and
designs, and cremation.
Solid monuments for the well-to-do and powerful attest to the enter-
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