Breaking the Burial Jars

http://www.karencoates.com/Stories/ForestOfUrns.html

Breaking the Burial Jars

(A version of this article was translated into Spanish and ran in GEO Spain)

By Karen J. Coates

Walter Paran was a lucky boy. Three minutes out his front door lay an old grave in the forest marked by big stone slabs, a broken jar, and human bones. A few minutes another way was a pit where the riches of the dead were purportedly buried. What more could an inquisitive kid want?

Back then, in the 1970s, Walter didn’t know much about archaeology. He had heard that the burial site, Batu Ritong, held the remains of a prominent ancestor. He and his friends explored the forest around the stone-slab enclosures cautiously. “We were afraid when we came here.” Superstition mixed with curiosity.

Walter grew up in the Kelabit Highlands of Malaysia’s Sarawak state. For centuries, the Kelabit people have lived deep in Borneo’s upland jungles, having practiced animism and headhunting until missionaries converted them to Christianity after World War II. Before that, the Kelabits erected megalithic monuments such as Batu Ritong, where ancestral remains were buried in large ceramic jars. They also erected separate memorials where the belongings of the deceased were buried. Walter takes us to such a place on the other side of his village. It consists of a couple of big stone slabs propped on boulders, covering dozens of small stones, and an ancestor’s belongings in the ground. Villagers do not dig up the valuables, Walter says, “otherwise your life is not nice.”

Walter worries about these sites. Much of the Kelabit Highlands is slated for logging, and Walter fears Kelabit relics and features will perish by axe and bulldozer before archaeologists can study them.

“As yet, no proper archaeological work has been done in the Kelabit Highlands,” says Monica Janowski, a University of Greenwich, England, anthropologist. She is part of a research project that will map and investigate highlands archaeology and trace the relationship between people and environment through time.

“The forest is part and parcel of that heritage, lived in and altered by humans at least 50,000 years ago,” says the project’s principal investigator, Professor Graeme Barker of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, England. “We need to designate a series of ‘archaeological landscapes’ and protect them.”

Logging poses a direct threat. That’s why many Kelabits hope for an extension of the recently established Pulong Tau National Park, to encompass nearly 400,000 acres and the archaeology within. Pulong Tau, now about 150,000 acres, is part of a conservation project straddling the border between Sarawak and Indonesia’s Kalimantan province. The International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), an intergovernmental organization promoting sustainable forest practices and conservation, endorses the project and has collaborated with local people to survey highland cultural sites. The project documented 88 sites, including 42 megaliths of varying types.

But Kelabit archaeology encompasses far more than monuments, “because the landscape is also a cultural and historical artifact,” Barker explains. His team’s preliminary survey in the southern highlands found a range of archaeological sites beyond megaliths and burials.

Walter knows his tribe’s archaeology is fading fast. Jar burials and funerary celebrations have ceased since Christianity’s introduction, and artifacts have deteriorated with time and neglect. Take Batu Ritong: Mosses grow through the tiny human bone fragments, and jar shards lay helter-skelter among sticks, stones and weeds. About three miles from there, a dozen imported Chinese jars sit in the tangled forest, some buried, some broken, many embossed with common Asian dragon designs. Our guide, Sylvester Kalang Talan Pitan, says people rarely come here. He knows little about the jars. “Even the old men don’t know how old these are.”

But Uun, Walter’s elderly father, recalls stories of old burial ceremonies. “When a father passed away, we would put his remains in the jar to show our love,” he says. “In the olden days, the jars were very expensive.” There were three styles: jars with dragon designs (the oldest type, which sold for 20 buffaloes), jars with flowers and jars with crocodiles, both of which were much cheaper. They were bought from a faraway town called Lawas. “If we carried these heavy things here, it took two weeks. Two weeks plus.”

Uun sits cross-legged on Walter’s floor, wearing a Metallica hat, which he bought on the coast. He talks of the headhunting years. Uun grew up with human heads hanging from the longhouse rafters. “It was just normal.” Once, he says, a marauding tribe attacked his grandfather’s village and the people escaped to a jar burial site in the jungle. They camped at that site for months, unable to work their fields. They grew hungry. Eventually, they sacrificed one villager to the enemy as payment for safe passage to their homes and paddies.

As Sylvester treks through the forest, he points to megaliths marked by yellow ITTO signs. Some sites have no fences. One is circled by a rudimentary barrier that might deter a buffalo – but not a bulldozer. Like other Kelabits, Sylvester worries about the future. From time immemorial, feet were the only mode of transportation around the area. Airplanes came with WWII, opening the highlands to those with money and the inclination. Now, a growing spiderweb of logging roads fans across the landscape, creeping closer to the Kelabits. “It’s disgusting,” says a pilot who flies the area. “No one can stop them.”

Janowski warns that even a national park extension would not guarantee the survival of Kelabit relics. “I am not sure how much the logging companies will respect the sites.”

Dr. Paul Chai of the ITTO Biodiversity Conservation Project says ITTO is not involved in timber licensing. “But we have sent survey information and maps to the contractors to request them to keep out of the sites.” Locals also must ask the Sarawak Museum to protect the area, he says.

Walter seems harried when pointing to the mountains beyond his village. The logging trucks are there, just over the hill. Sometimes the wind carries the sound of their grinding engines. He invites us to explore more burial sites and megaliths up there — soon.

“I hope that you come before the logging enters this side.”