by Tim Hannigan
Some 200 million years ago the bulk of the world’s landmasses formed two enormous continents. Laurasia lay to the north; to the south was what we know today as Gondwana, a jumbled jigsaw made up of Africa, Australia, South America, Antarctica and India. Between these two supercontinents was a stretch of turbid water known as the Tethys Ocean. At around the time that the dinosaurs were stalking the earth Gondwana started to break apart, and its fragments, carried on the deep convection currents of the earth’s mantle, began to sail slowly away towards their current locations. One of the largest of these fragments was the Indo-Australian Plate, an enormous raft of rock with Australia at the stern and the Indian subcontinent for a bowsprit. It travelled north at a formidable rate, covering eight inches (twenty centimetres) a year at times, and squeezing the Tethys Ocean into an ever narrower space. Eventually, the Indian section of the plate ground into the Eurasian Plate, the greatest fragment of old Laurasia. The impact formed the Himalayas, lifting limestone sediments from the bed of the Tethys Ocean to the very summit of Mount Everest.
As the Indo-Australian Plate was driving northwards it was also pivoting towards the northeast, and another impact was threatening. It came some 70 million years ago as the Indo-Australian Plate ploughed into the Sunda Plate, an extension jutting from the underbelly of Eurasia, where Thailand, Cambodia—and, indeed, Indonesia—lie today. This was a thick, spongy plate, deeper but less dense than its counterpart, and the Indo-Australian Plate was forced beneath it, its leading edge driving down into the very mantle of the earth. Fragments from the outer skin of the Indo-Australian Plate—chunks of sedimentary rock originally laid down below sea level—were scraped off at the subduction zone and thrown up along the southern edge of the Sunda Plate like flotsam. These fragments would eventually form the islands of Timor, Sabu and Sumba, the high limestone peninsula that hangs at the southern tip of Bali, and the banks of karst that stretch through southern Java. The Sunda Plate itself, meanwhile, had been cracked and torn by the impact, and through these fissures the materials of the Indo-Australian Plate, rendered in the heat below, were reborn, surging up to leave a rash of volcanoes just north of the plate boundary.
The shifting of the plates was an incredibly slow process, of course, unfolding over many millions of years. But the volcanoes born of the impact could sometimes rise with incredible speed, a new cone of black rubble emerging suddenly from the sea to create a substantial new island over the course of just a few decades. And equally, these volcanoes could obliterate themselves and all that surrounded them in a single, cataclysmic moment. Where they didn’t blow themselves apart, however, they formed new lands, and in time they created the entire chain of the Archipelago’s southern arc. Beyond this arc, meanwhile, a chaos of plate fragments, fault lines and boundaries had formed the less orderly islands of the northern arc.
If you look at a map of the Archipelago today there is a definite sense of movement, a clear contrast to the solid hulks of Australia, Africa or mainland Asia. Individual islands seem to dance before your eyes. It is a far from fanciful impression, for there is still much movement here. The Indo-Australian Plate is still driving beneath the Sunda Plate, and the volcanoes are still fuming along the entire length of the chain. The plate boundary produces endless earthquakes, as do the myriad shorter fractures amongst the islands of the northern arc. There are few more dynamic landscapes anywhere on earth.
Once the new lands had formed from the impact of the Indo-Australian and Sunda plates, it took no time at all for the first greenery to sprout amongst the black volcanic debris. Stretching across the equator, the Archipelago was a warm place, well watered by monsoon rains during the northern winter, and an apocalyptic volcanic wasteland could turn to jungle within a few seasons. There were chunks of old land mixed in amongst the new landfalls here, too, pieces torn from the original plates, and these already had their own forests and their own fauna. In fact, the dividing line between the Asian and Australian ecological spheres ran right through the middle of the Archipelago. In Sumatra and Java there were rhinos and apes and other big beasts of the Asian mainland. In New Guinea and the fragments of Maluku that had once been part Gondwana, meanwhile, there were marsupials, cockatoos and parakeets. The rise and fall of the sea levels over the millennia meant that there was a certain blurring of the boundary between these spheres, particularly in Sulawesi, where some fragments of the island had started life in Gondwana and some in Laurasia. But there were some absolutes: there have never been tigers east of Bali.
The Archipelago was a lush place. The long chains of smoking volcanoes and the subterranean fault-lines gave it a definite volatility, but it brimmed with bird and animal life. Its dark volcanic soils were formidably fertile, and its warm seas teemed with fish. All that it needed was the first people to turn up.
CHAPTER 1
FROM HOBBITS
TO HINDUISM:
PREHISTORY
TO INDIANISATION
The little group moved quietly uphill through the trees. They were wiry men with long limbs and dark skin, carrying spears tipped with chipped stone and woven baskets loaded with edible things from the forest. They had been following the line of a thin river snaking through the hills, and they had spotted the cave from below. It formed a hollow in the western ranges of an island that the first Portuguese sailors, many millennia later, would call Flores—‘flowers’ in their own language. There were few dangerous animals in these forests, but three thousand feet above sea level it would be cold after dark, and the cave would make a fine shelter for the night. The men paused for a moment on the threshold. It was a vast space, with a vaulted ceiling of dangling stalactites. They made their camp—perhaps not too far back into the darkness—and sparked a fire from the dry things in their baskets.
The men were Melanesian hunter-gatherers, part of a wider population that was slowly picking its way through the forests of the Archipelago. The Melanesians were, as far as we know, the first modern humans to reach what is now Indonesia, some forty thousand years ago. They carried stone axes and they buried their dead. Sometimes they laid their hands on the walls of caves, then blew a thick spray of chewed ochre pigment against the rock to leave a ghostly outline of their presence. For the most part they moved through the open forests or along streams and shorelines, hunting out fruits and roots, fish and shellfish, and wild animals for meat. Eventually, in the more fertile landscapes, they settled into hut clusters and cleared the ground for a simple kind of agriculture.
Their movement through the Archipelago was generally slow: they had time and geography on their side, for during much of their period of expansion the sea levels were far lower than they are today. At the poles the icecaps had swollen, locking up huge quantities of the world’s water, and you could walk from Thailand to Bali without getting your feet wet. Every so often, however, some unknown impetus prompted a more decisive journey, and the Melanesians took to the water on rough craft. The near ancestors of the little band, settling down for the evening in the Flores cave, had made the crossing over the current-charged Lombok Strait between Bali and what is now the island chain of Nusa Tenggara, a body of water so deep that it had never dried out. More of these crossings followed, and eventually the Melanesians would carry their journeys to New Guinea, and out into the long vapour trail of islands in the southwest Pacific.
But this group of travellers—crouched around the campfire in the limestone hollow which their distant descendants would call Liang Bua, ‘The Cool Cave’—had no reason to believe that anyone had been here before them. The men could not have known that they had paused at one of the great S-bends of palaeontology, one of those rare traps—almost always a cave—where all the muck of prehistory accumulates in deep layers.
Perhaps one of their number went out at dusk to forage. Perhaps he heard something moving in the bushes and assumed it was a giant monitor lizard or one of the elusive dwarf elephants that lived in the deeper parts of the forest. But what he actually saw when he looked up must ha
ve sent a powerful pulse of shock deep into his core: it was a creature on the cusp between a something and a someone, staring back at him from the undergrowth.
It was dark and heavyset, with short legs and long, flat feet. Its brow sloped down into a broad face and its arms hung low at its sides. It was almost—almost—like a crude reflection of the Melanesian traveller himself, but for the fact that its head would barely have reached his waist. If they made eye contact it must have been a profoundly unsettling moment. Then the creature turned and hurried away into the trees with a strange, high-stepping gait, and the man shrieked over his shoulder to his friends in the cave that there was something out there in the forest…
Though the inhabitants of Flores would tell tall tales of a short people called the Ebu Gogo long into the twentieth century, no one knew that the stories might have some connection with fact until 2003, when a team of Indonesian and Australian palaeontologists, digging in the damp levels of the Liang Bua cave, came upon a tiny 18,000-year-old skeleton, ‘as fragile as wet blotting paper’. Elsewhere in the cave they found other bone fragments from the same creature, some dating back as far as 95,000 years, along with shards of worked stone suggesting that, whatever it was, it had been able to use simple tools. The individual specimens were simply numbered, and the putative new species was named Homo floresiensis. But the media, noting its three-foot-high stature and big feet, quickly dubbed it ‘the Hobbit’.
In the subsequent years the scientific community fell to bitter wrangling over the precise nature of this forgotten population of tiny hominids. Some claimed that it was a late-surviving relic of the pre-human Homo erectus. Others insisted that the Ebu Gogo were simply modern humans suffering from a genetic disorder or a malfunctioning thyroid. Based on the long timescale of the creatures’ existence and several crucial features of its skeleton, current consensus is edging towards the notion of a new species, more closely connected to the earlier Homo erectus than the later Homo sapiens, but all these arguments miss the most startling point.
We have long known that there were early humanoids in Java more than a million years ago. Their bones have been found along the banks of the Solo River. Thickset, heavy-jawed and beetle-browed, they are popularly known as ‘Java Man’. But Java was connected to mainland Asia at various points, and no one credited these lumbering ape-men with much more than a meandering journey on foot, and technological skills extending no further than a few crude stone choppers. But the discovery of the Flores Hobbit proved that long, long before the Melanesians arrived—at least 95,000 years ago, and possibly as far back as 840,000 years—something almost human had made the first serious maritime journey in Indonesian history: across the Lombok Strait, the great Rubicon between the Asian and Australian ecological spheres. More remarkably still, that creature was still there, deep into the period of Melanesian travel in the Archipelago.
The Ebu Gogo myth notwithstanding, it is generally assumed that the Hobbits vanished some 12,000 years ago, around the same time that the dwarf Flores elephant died out, possibly due to a major volcanic eruption. But its unsettling presence in the forest offers a glimpse of the deep layers that lie beneath the shallow topsoil of tangible human history.
History has to start somewhere, however, and the arrival of the Melanesians in the Archipelago is the perfect point of departure. Not only were they the first modern humans in the region; their descendants still live in large swathes of eastern Indonesia today. Dark-skinned and curly-headed, Melanesian people predominate in the regions of East Nusa Tenggara, southern Maluku and New Guinea.
This Melanesian realm represents the outland of modern Indonesia, however, and most of the major set-pieces of the region’s history were staged far to the west in the busy spaces of Sumatra and Java. The inhabitants of these places represent a far more recent series of landfalls in Southeast Asia, and they belong to the greatest tribe of maritime travellers the world has ever known—the Austronesians.
No one knows why they left; no one knows how many of them there were; but sometime around seven thousand years ago, a number of people set out towards the southeast from the damp interior of southern China. They headed not directly to Southeast Asia, but to Taiwan. This small teardrop of mountainous land was to prove the unlikely springboard for an epic expansion.
From around six thousand years ago, propelled most probably by local overpopulation, early Taiwanese Austronesians took to their boats—small, open outriggers for the most part—and headed south to the northern Philippines. They brought with them dogs and pigs, pottery made of red clay, and well-worked stone axes. They also knew how to tame buffalo and grow rice. Once they had reached the Philippines, the galaxy of islands beyond sucked them ceaselessly southwards. Some five thousand years ago they made it to Sulawesi, and half a millennium later—at about the same time that the Egyptians were working on the Great Pyramid at Giza—they made further journeys to reach Java, Sumatra, Timor and Borneo. From the latter landfall some of their number hopped back northwards across the South China Sea to settle in the southern corner of Indochina. Others turned sharply eastwards to find footholds on the northern foreshore of New Guinea, and then embarked on the most improbable of all their journeys, launching themselves into the apparent abyss of the Pacific Ocean to become the Polynesians. By the time the Anglo-Saxons were established in England and the Abbasid Caliphate approaching its apogee in far-off Baghdad, they had made it to Hawaii and Easter Island. Meanwhile, back to the west, other Austronesian seafarers had set out from the Archipelago on a voyage that would place the horizontal poles of their realm a full 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometres) apart: around 1,500 years ago they crossed the Indian Ocean and settled in Madagascar.
Historical distance has a telescoping effect, and this, coupled with crude maps and précising passages, can all too easily give an impression of the Austronesians coming in great waves—a waterborne Southern Mongoloid horde sweeping all aside as they rampage from island to island. The Austronesian expansion was indeed one of the swiftest and broadest in human history, but even so, more than four thousand years separated their first departures from Taiwan and the last of their major migrations to New Zealand. By then the Maoris, the Javanese and the Taiwanese aborigines were nothing more than distant linguistic cousins. Even within the Archipelago, where the journeys between islands were modest, they would have moved slowly over the course of many generations, and most Austronesians probably had no idea that they were participants in some globe-straddling migratory epic.
As the Austronesians settled into the Archipelago they formed villages—huddles of high-roofed huts in the green spaces between the volcanoes. They raised pigs and chickens and made pots, cleared patches of forest, and began to grow rice, and slowly developed into the Javanese, Balinese, Malays, and the other peoples of the western Archipelago. Theirs was a society of scattered settlements, a culture of clans, not kings. Wars—and there surely were wars—were small in scale and tribal in nature. There was no obvious political unity beyond that of individual communities, but there was a certain cultural continuity.
Given that most parts of the Archipelago have subsequently come under the influence of two or even three major world religions, it would be easy to suppose that no trace of what went before could possibly remain. But look at Indonesia in the right light and the original outlines still show through today. The most obvious places to start looking are in the remote eastern landfalls where neither Hindu-Buddhism nor Islam, still less Dutch colonialism, ever had much impact—places where a resolute handful still cling to the unsanctioned religious designation of ‘other’. Sumba, in the nether regions of Nusa Tenggara, is one such place. Here, indigenous ancestor worship has only ceased to be the dominant religious tradition within the last two generations, and here, as in the old Austronesian world, there is a culture of clans and villages without dominant kings. The traditional belief system in Sumba is known simply as Marapu—‘Ancestors’—and it is the forefathers who are given the active role in a spirit
ual world from which the Supreme Being has long-since disengaged. Village homes with a founding lineage are built with enormous towering roofs as both a symbol of long descent and as a temporal abode for the ancestral spirits, and the most important moment in life is death. The journey to join the ancestors is marked by epic funerals, the bloody sacrifice of a buffalo, and interment in monumental stone sarcophagi, eerily echoing the cromlechs and portal dolmens of prehistoric Europe.
None of this stuff is restricted to Sumba, however. Four hundred miles to the northwest, in Sulawesi’s Tana Toraja, there are similarly bloody and grandiose funerals, and a nine-hundred-mile journey westward from there finds a clear echo of the sweeping, ship-like rooftops of the Toraja villages in the Minangkabau settlements of Sumatra. Even in Java and Bali, the places most thoroughly drenched with foreign culture, there are older traces. The old affection for tombs plays into a Balinese system in which formal Hindu cremation (with pomp and circumstance strikingly similar to that of Torajan or Sumban funeral rites) comes only after an initial burial in a village graveyard. In Java, meanwhile, the classic local architectural feature—the joglo, the towering pavilion roof—is in its original form simply the high-hatted home of those claiming descent from village founders, essentially identical to the clan houses of Sumba.
The Austronesians had arrived by water, and the sea lanes did not salt up in their wake. Small, fast-running outriggers crisscrossed the shallow seas from the earliest days, carrying modest cargoes—at first within the Archipelago, and then further afield. Here and there some radical new product was carried back to the islands from the Asian mainland. Around three thousand years ago a skilful society of metalworkers, the Dong Son, had developed in the north of what is now Vietnam. Amongst the fine bronze items that they forged through their cunning ‘lost wax technique’ were mighty kettle drums. By the middle of the first millennium BCE these drums were beginning to appear across the Archipelago, where the people of Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara found a role for them in their own traditions as prestige objects, and even as coffins. Before long, ores were being shipped from the Archipelago to the Asian mainland, and metalworking techniques were being quietly transmitted back into the ports of Java and Sumatra. An international trade network was slowly coming together, and the Austronesians of the western Archipelago would soon find themselves at one of the most important maritime staging posts on earth, the point of contact between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and the halfway house for seaborne traffic between the twin behemoths of mainland Asia: China and India.