Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

I have arrived at this point in my arguments where I
can suggest that at least a portion of the ancestry of
the Malay peoples were maritime sailors living along
the coast of South China as early as around 3000
B.C.E. Their ancestry would not have started at that
time but would have gone back to the earlier people of
the area who made the cord-marked pottery. These also
would have been what I have named the “Nusantao”
and would have been a part of the Nusantao Maritime
Trading and Communication Network (NMTCN).
This is another story that I have been working with for
over 30 years and will not go into that here. (Solheim,
n.d.a) I mention it as I hypothesize it was this maritime
network that brought the people who first settled at
Gua Sirih bringing with them the many elements of
pottery manufacture present from the beginning of
pottery manufacture at Gua Sirih, all of which had been
developed in part along the eastern coastal area of Vietnam
and South China.
I bring in here a statement from Father Finn (1975, 132),
a Jesuit who was important in the early development of
archaeology in the Hong Kong area and neighboring
coastal South China.
“Probably, the whole picture is that of a nodal point
in the first century B.C. (Ts’in Shi Hwang c. 215 B.C.;
Han Wu Ti c. 120 B.C.) deriving its higher culture
influences, perhaps under stress of arms, from China:
its native population owned a peculiarly mixed
culture that was common to the Southern coast and
even perhaps fringed the whole East up to Manchuria.
One might agree that the native culture could have
come from the South and that the same culture
affected the Philippines and Polynesia.”
Father Finn, in this statement made in about 1950, was
saying in very simple form, much of what I have been
saying about the working of the NMTCN going back
at least 7000 years.
To the best of my knowledge the recognition of
vine-wrapped and the very few papers in English that
have mentioned this bound-paddle method of making
pottery has not yet been noticed outside of Vietnam.
As I have explained elsewhere (n.d.b) the details of
recognizing and differentiating between basket-marking
and vine-wrapping of earthenware pottery I will not
go into here. Previous to this paper, both methods of
surface working clay vessels before firing were included
in basket-marking. At Gua Sirih the vine-wrapped
pottery was considerably more common than the basketmarked.
HERITAGE, IDENTITY, CHANGE AND CONFLICT
It has been suggested that the use of a carved-paddle to
make the geometric pottery of coastal South China
developed out of the use of cord-marking. Cord-marking
as found in Southeast Asia is done with a cord-wrapped
paddle. (Solheim, 1952b) I can think of no way to prove
this, but it seems logical to me that potters seeing what
different kinds of cord-wrapped on a paddle did to
the surface of an unfired clay vessel could lead to the
development of other ways of treating the surfaces of
the paddle, in particular carving. The simplest kind of
paddle-carving is straight, parallel lines a short distance
apart. When this is done with no strikeovers in the
manufacture of the new vessel it looks very much like
that made by vine-wrapping. When there is over-striking
of the parallel lined carved-paddle, it looks similar to
basket-marked vessels (see Plate I and II). It was this
simple kind of carved-paddle decoration that was
present early in Tabon Cave that I confused with the
Bau-Malay pottery.
I have not yet come to a conclusion as to where the
“bound-paddle” type of surface treatment fits. It is
obvious, however, that it was by far the earliest in its
vine-wrapped form of any of the methods of pottery
manufacture found in Southeast Asia. So, it was quite
likely the ultimate ancestor of all the different methods.
WHAT DO I INTERPRET FROM THE GUA
SIRIH EXCAVATION
My main interest in doing archeology has been: what
were the origins of the present day peoples of Southeast
Asia, how did they get to where they are living today,
and what are and have been their relationships with the
many different nationalities of Southeast Asia today?
This means that my interpretations of my excavation of
Gua Sirih are concerned primarily with the context of
Gua Sirih and its inhabitants over time with the rest of
Southeast Asia and the world. Unlike most of today’s
archaeologists, I am only somewhat interested in the social
organization, culture, and life styles of these peoples.
I have found in talking with local peoples everywhere,
not only in Southeast Asia, that one of their first
questions is “Where did my ancestors come from and
along with this how did they get here?” That is what my
interpretations of Gua Sirih focus on. This must take
into consideration much more than simply Gua Sirih
itself.
In the past, there were physically two different
types of people living in Southeast Asia. One was the
people who moved around by water and the other by
land. The water-moving people, particularly the men,
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
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