| Page 693 | |
published are usually preliminary reports, with very little detail.
The first archaeological work to be done in the Andaman Islands was by P.C. Dutta (1962) in 1959–1960. In 1985 Zarine Cooper located thirty-nine shell middens and excavated in some of these. Her first report was primarily concerned with the sites and the second (Cooper and Raghavan 1989) with the pottery recovered.
Peter Bellwood has published two different books that review the prehistory of Island Southeast Asia. The first of these (1978, 203–232) is a brief summary while the second (1985) is a detailed and lengthy account; however, both of these were the first coverage of Island Southeast Asian prehistory as a whole.
Bellwood and I.M. Sutayasa started a program of research in northern Sulawesi and the Talaud Islands, a string of islands running between eastern Mindanao in the Philippines and Sulawesi. The sites they discovered and reported (Bellwood 1976, 1980) date from 6000 b.c. to the present. The late-prehistoric to early-historic pottery reported showed a close relationship to pottery in the Philippines.
The first program of archaeological research in eastern Indonesia started in Irian Jaya in 1975, when Solheim began a one-year program of survey and excavation in coastal Irian Jaya, primarily on islands in Cenderawasih Bay, Waigeo, off the western tip of the Vogelkop, and east and west from Kaimana on the south coast. This program continued in 1990 with the testing of a site near Sorong on the north coast of the Vogelkop and a survey on Ternate and northwestern Halmahara in the Moluccas. In 1990 Bellwood started a program on Morotai, the most northerly of the Moluccas Islands. In 1992 the University of Hawaii, jointly with Universitas Pattimura on Ambon and the National Research Center of Archaeology, started a long-term program in the Moluccas. The program includes archaeological survey and excavation on the islands of Buru, Seram, and Ambon, under the direction of Bion Griffin of the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii.
In 1993 Irian Jaya Studies, a priority program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, started a long-term program of research of the Vogelkop (Birdshead) of Irian Jaya. Included in that multidisciplinary project is an archaeological survey and excavation under the direction of Gert-Jan Bartstra.
Much of the archaeological publication during the Dutch governance of Indonesia was in Dutch. As the Lembaga Purbakala dan Peninggalan Nasional and now the Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (National Research Center of Archaeology) took over responsibility for archaeological research, most of their reports were published in Indonesian with only general surveys published in English. To keep up with Indonesian archaeology it is necessary to read Indonesian, which I do not do. Very kindly John Miksic has summarized the recent history of archaeology of Indonesia for me. Miksic taught archaeology for several years at Gaja Mada University in Yogyakarta and is now with the Department of History, Singapore National University. I present his paper in its original form, with thanks.
Archaeological research in Indonesia was practically dormant during the late 1950s and 1960s, as Indonesia experienced political turbulence. The most important research conducted in the 1960s was that of R.P. Soejono at Gilimanuk in western Bali, a large site containing many late prehistoric burials. Excavations were undertaken in 1963, 1964, 1973, and 1977. In 1977 Soejono obtained his Ph.D. in archaeology with a dissertation on late prehistoric burial sites in Bali. Gilimanuk occupied a major portion of this study, along with the sites of stone sarcophagi.
The tempo of archaeological research picked up in the 1970s, particularly after 1975, when administrative restructuring transformed the old system inherited from the Dutch of a single institution in charge of both research and conservation. Research became the sole responsibility of the newly formed National Research
| |