Living Ape-Men
Later, in Malaya, McKinnon saw some casts of footprints even bigger than those he had seen in Borneo, but he recognized them as definitely having been made by the same kind of creature. The Malayans called it Orang pendek (short fellow). McKinnon stated: "Again natives spoke of a creature with long hair, who walks upright like a man. Drawings and even photographs of similar footprints found in Sumatra are attributed to the Sedapa or Umang, a small, shy, longhaired, bipedal being living deep in the forest" (Green 1978, pp. 134-135). According to Ivan Sanderson, these footprints differ from those of the anthropoid apes inhabiting the Indonesian forests (the gibbon, siamang, and orangutan). They are also distinct from those of the sun bear (Sanderson 1961, p. 219).
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Statue in auction may be from Borobudur
by Sri Wahyuni, The Jakarta Post, April 9, 2005
Magelang, Central Java (Indonesia) — It is possible that the Buddha statue withdrawn last week from an auction at Christie’s in New York, following a request from the government of Indonesia, might have originated from the famous Borobudur temple in Central Java.
"Seen from its physical structure, as we saw it from the picture faxed to my office by the Ministry of Education and Culture some 10 days ago, it does have a similarity to the Borobudur statues," Borobudur Conservational Office head Dukut Santoso told The Jakarta Post at his office here earlier this week.
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Ethnoarchaeology and Gender
In the early 1990s Hetty Jo Brumbach and Robert Jarvenpa embarked on a new phase of ethnoarchaeological research that focused on gender dynamics. Realizing that archaeological treatments of women’s and men’s roles had not kept pace with the burgeoning work on gender relations, sexual stratification and related issues in cultural anthropology, we returned for additional fieldwork with our Chipewyan friends and consultants in Patuanak and Knee Lake, Saskatchewan.
Several additional late historical archaeological sites were documented, providing a total of 44 sites in our regional database. Adapting a "task differentiation" framework developed by Janet Spector, we systematically interviewed Chipewyan women and men about a range of subsistence activities involved in the pursuit, harvesting, processing, consumption and storage of animal and plant food resources and products. By integrating such testimony with observation of ongoing hunting and fishing behaviors and historical archaeological patterning, we developed several empirical generalizations about women’s and men’s behavior in foraging societies that have implications for archaeological interpretation generally.
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Ethnoarchaeology in Indonesia and Southeast Asia
I chose Southeast Asia and Indonesia for this research because this area is well-known for the importance of feasting in its many traditional societies, and many accounts of feasts describe them as being given entirely for prestige, or "merit," either in this world or the afterworld. Thus, it seemed to be a good test case for the ecological model.
The ethnoarcheological work that I am pursing in Indonesia in conjunction with Ron Adams is focused on documenting:
- The range of feasts in traditional Torajan society,
- The costs and benefits of feasts, and
- The way that feasts are used to create political alliances within and between communities.
Traditional Torajan communities range from transegalitarian to simple chiefdom societies. Torajan funeral feasts are some of the most extravagant competitive displays that we know of in the contemporary world. More detailed analyses are presented in a preliminary report by myself (Torajan Feasting in South Sulawesi-.pdf file), and in Adams’ MA Thesis.
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