TREADING HERITAGE EVERYWHERE

INDONESIA’S RICHES - TOO PRECIOUS TO EXPORT 

To the Europeans and before them the Arabs and Indians, the lure of the archipelago was resources and trade.

That’s still the case as exports of coal, gold and minerals needed in batteries and electronics are powering the Republic’s economy ahead of its neighbours.

But the islands have something else that can’t be tipped into barges and stuffed into containers, yet precious beyond mountains of dollars.  History, and at last we’re becoming aware of the riches.

With no names and few facts, we’ll have to construct a story  - which is what archaeologists are doing all the time, like detectives on a cold case.

Let’s call him Agus, the unknown hero.  Late last decade he was working on the Malang end of the toll road linking the Central East Java hilltown with the provincial north-coast capital Surabaya.

Maybe it was a slack day, or the crews were waiting for more concrete. Perhaps he needed to relieve himself so wandered into the scrub where he noticed a red brick.

So what?  Despite forests of signs warning locals not to dump rubbish, rivers and uncropped land are popular tips, so building rubble would be nothing unusual.

Except this brick was much larger than the standard, and Agus was blessed with that most desirable but underrated quality - curiosity.

He picked up the brick, found others, spoke out - and now we know of another temple site.  How old, how big, what name - there are more questions with the answers depending on funds for excavation.

In the nearby hamlet of Srigading workers on another site are being paid by a local businessman who was told of a mound in the centre of a flat field of sugarcane.

The villagers called it Cegumuk - meaning something stuck in the throat, so maybe someone once heard a noise. It was just a nuisance.  Then a wise one reasoned the rise might not be a geological feature.  They were right.

Now it’s a government excavation that’s already yielded artefacts from a thousand years ago, Java’s golden age. Literally, for the top of an urn made from the yellow metal has already been discovered.

The site is most likely a temple from the late Mataram period, the Hindu–Buddhist kingdom that ruled much of Central and East Java between the 8th and 11th centuries.

Archaeologist and dig supervisor Wicaksono Dwi Nugroho said: ‘‘Under the topsoil was a large linga and yoni carved from a rock which isn’t found round here’.  He thinks the red-brick temple probably stood 11 metres high and covered a ten-by-ten-metre base.

 ‘Moving the yoni aside revealed a shaft about three by three metres. So far we’ve retrieved three statues, some clay pots and a broken ceramic plate which was probably traded from China.’

A yoni represents the goddess Shakti, the linga its masculine counterpart. The Encyclopaedia of Hinduism defines the icons as ‘the union of the feminine and the masculine that recreates all of existence.’ Although Srigading is largely Muslim, the yoni has been sprinkled with blossom and wrapped in white cloth.

Opening the mound has led to supernatural sightings. Locals told one reporter of ‘strange events’ near the temple and a ‘large black man towering up to more than two meters ... sitting cross-legged on the rock ‘like a ‘guardian’.

The Hindu kingdoms collapsed in the 16th century. The reasons are contested - the spread of Islam, breakups in the ruling families, power shifts or volcanic eruptions. The survivors fled east and mainly settled in Bali which remains Indonesia’s only Hindu province.

The holy places were abandoned, plundered by treasure seekers and builders seeking bricks. Jungle creepers soon masked the remains.

For much of the 350 years of colonialism, the Dutch were more interested in guilder than curiosities. But between 1811 and 1814 Thomas Stamford Raffles was the Lieutenant-Governor of Java following the Napoleonic Wars.

A refined Englishman who spoke Malay, Raffles was bewitched by the traditions and masterpieces of architecture and engineering the Dutch had ignored. 

His 1817 The History of Java, describes the story of the island from ancient times plus its mores, arts, beliefs, geography, flora, and fauna. It’s available online.

When the Dutch regained control they started recording sites and shipped statues to Leiden where many still await repatriation. After the 1945 Declaration of Independence preservation of the new nation was more important than conserving history.

Now a younger generation is recognising the earlier centuries and venerating pre-colonial heroes, like Majapahit era prime minister Gajah Mada (1290-1364). One of the nation’s most prestigious universities carries his name.

The early kingdoms are becoming the foundations for Indonesian nationalism, according to Indonesian historian Dr Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan:

‘Faced with the diversity of languages, customs and religions in the archipelago, leaders … turned to the pre-modern past to find powerful states (as) precursors of modern Indonesia.’ They chose Majapahit.

The palm-leaf manuscript Nagarakretagama, written in 1365 claims Majapahit had 98 tributary states from Sumatra in the west to New Guinea and included Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, southern Thailand and the Philippines’ Sulu Archipelago.

Once taught that everything started in 1945 we’re now learning that Dutch colonialism was but a hiccup.  Or Cegumuk.

First published in Indonesia Expat, November 2022: https://online.fliphtml5.com/qinqh/coej/#p=7

DIGGING UP POLITICS

THE TROUBLE WITH HOBBITS © Duncan Graham 2007

The sub-title for this review could read: Australiana Jones and the Tropical Leprechauns, but that might deter readers who expect learned discussion on these pages.

Although The Discovery of the Hobbit is about a serious topic, the unearthing of skeletal remains in Indonesia that have rocked thinking about the evolution of humankind, it’s also a rollicking, bone-jarring adventure.

Political intrigue, rampant nationalism, confrontations across continents, backstabbing and badmouthing, skeletons in cupboards and, of course, skullduggery.

The bare bones of the story are well known: Back in 2004, an Indonesian-Australian (or should that order be reversed because the funding came from Down Under?) team of archaeologists digging in a cool cave called Liang Bua on Flores, claimed a remarkable discovery.

They said that a year earlier they’d found the remains of a woman, a member of a previously unknown species of mini hominids, a now extinct race of dark-skinned people with small brains and long arms. Measured against a modern Caucasian the first lady of Flores would have just reached her big cousin’s navel.

She and her family (other remains were found later) were baptized Homo floresiensis by the scientists. But the term Hobbits resonated with a public still in thrall of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The little woman had probably died about 18,000 years ago and her race vanished maybe 5,000 years later. She was about 30 when she perished from unknown causes.

Not all were delighted with the find; although the scientists seem to have tried to be inclusive, the Australians, and Professor Mike Morwood in particular, were doing all the running.

The international media was going ape and all wanted to talk to the bearded bule who looked the part of the dauntless white explorer. A planned press conference for Jakarta to coincide with the Australian release of the news and featuring Indonesian experts didn’t go ahead and Morwood seems not to know why.

As all foreigners who live in this country understand well, robust nationalism, well infected with xenophobia is as widespread as dengue fever. In Yogyakarta, far from Flores, and not involved in the dig, was Professor Teuku Jacob, head of the palaeoanthropology laboratory at the prestigious University of Gadjah Mada.

This senior academic was also a war veteran who had broadcast resistance messages during the Japanese occupation. His lifelong friend was another hero from the same period, Raden Pandji Soejono, a Javanese aristocrat and former head of the National Center for Archaeology.

Soejono had worked at Liang Bua in the 1980s but had not excavated deeply and apparently hadn’t had his work published. In the world of science this is an awesome failing.

As the skeleton had been found in Flores she was Indonesian and the grubby hands of uncouth foreigners insensitive to protocols should be kept well away from her fragile fibula. This was so delicate that when first found (by Indonesians while Morwood was absent) it ‘had the consistency of wet blotting paper’.

In this book Morwood said he ‘anticipated healthy debate’ about the find. But by his own admission he was ‘a newcomer to Indonesia who was politically naive’.

When Soejono wanted to hand over the skeleton to Jacob without allowing the finders to set terms for access and be acknowledged, a distressed Morwood was told that giving credit to young researchers was ‘not the Indonesian way.’

If you think only the coarse and the crass behave badly and that the better educated have evolved to follow superior codes of behavior, then this book is a revelation. Be you peasant or professor, we are still subject to the human evils of jealousy, hoarding, chicanery, dinosaur-sized egos and all the other sins of Adam. This is particularly so when personal reputations are at stake and someone else is invading our territory.

You can understand their sensitivity; if you’d built your life and a splendid teaching career on the foundation of a theory that was suddenly undermined and destroyed by an upstart from afar digging on your patch, you’d be fighting to discredit the discovery.

Then there was the overburden of bureaucracy, and not all on the Indonesian side. At one stage Morwood was forbidden to travel to Indonesia by his fearful university because a government travel warning had been issued.

He eventually got permission for a quick trip provided he prepared a detailed schedule, including the exact time to travel from Soekarno-Hatta to the railway station. Easier to date a dodo.

I can’t tell you how it all ended because it hasn’t. Morwood and his supporters still reckon theirs is the biggest find in a century, set to rewrite evolutionary theories.

Meanwhile Jacob, backed by scientists from overseas, including Australia, say the wee lady was a retarded modern human pygmy suffering from microcephalia. This is a neurological disorder where the child is born with a small head.

It seems that in this fossil fight Morwood has all the big battalions of international science on his side and that Jacob is running a guerilla campaign for which he’s well equipped.

At one stage the old professor took a team of six researchers to Flores and spent five days measuring bodies, concluding that there were families of small people, perhaps with Hobbit ancestors.

Adding a touch of mysticism, the locals had tales of hobgoblins in the hills called Ebu Gogo who when given food also ate the plates.. Australian Aborigines have similar yarns (minus the dispensing of dishwashing), as do other cultures.

The book, co-authored by science writer Penny van Oosterzee gets bogged down at times with some lessons in archaeology. It’s also corrupted with clichés when more imaginative writing would have lifted the text.

Fortunately these complaints are offset by some frank and funny anecdotes. An earlier proposal for the Hobbit to be called Homo floresianus was fortunately buried when it was realized how palaeoanthropology students, with minds as dirty as their fingernails, might corrupt the name.

An artist commissioned to paint a portrait of Ms Flores shouldering a dead giant rodent added male genitalia. Apparently someone thought Hobbiteses too ladylike to have been rat-catchers and that equality had yet to evolve.

Thoroughly fed up with the demands of a film crew re-enacting a raft journey to Flores Morwood jumps up to remonstrate, falls over and breaks a bone. The confrontations between the deadline-conscious Australians and the status sensitive Indonesians should be used in handbooks on cross-cultural behavior.

Eclipsing all this are the fascinating questions. You don’t need to be an academic to build your own theories: Were the Hobbits really hominids? Their brain volume measured only 380 cc which is chimp size. The previous minimum qualification for entry to the human club was 500 cc, but definitions crumble once exposed to the light of fresh finds.

The evidence is that the Hobbits used stone tools, had captured fire and worked in groups. So they probably had language. Did they co-exist with humans? How did they become extinct? Or have they?

Why Flores? It may have once been joined to adjacent Sumbawa, the possible source of migrating hominids. Deep and turbulent waters protected the island from intruders. The so-called ‘island rule’ decrees that mammals shrink over the ages when confined to islands with limited resources and no predators.

Now it’s Professor Morwood’s turn to tremble every time he reads the scientific journal Nature; how long before the next batch of bright young wombats digs up more bones and artifacts that will make the Hobbit as dated as the safari suit? Watch this space.

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The Discovery of the Hobbit
By Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee
Published 2007 by Random House Australia
326 pages
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(First published in The Sunday Post 23 December 07)