Cultured rainforest

Project summary

Rainforests are frequently described as the world's last ‘virgin landscape.' However, recent work in tropical Southeast Asia has shown that hunter gatherers were modifying rainforest by clearing and burning over 40,000 years ago. In contrast, some present-day hunter-gatherers, rather than being remnants of an ancient way of life, may in fact be a relatively recent response to landscapes created by farmers. How has the rainforest shaped the lives of forest-dwellers and how have they shaped the rainforest?

For more details please go to the project summary document

Progress and Highlights

Year 1

The first fieldwork season took place from 24 June to 30 July 2007 in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak ( Borneo ). It highlighted the profound differences in the ways in which Kelabit farmer-foragers and Penan foragers see their respective ‘proper' relationships with the landscape. While the Kelabit aim to mark the landscape (constructing megalithic monuments, cutting ditches, making rice padi fields and cemeteries), the Penan aim to leave nothing but their personal traces, a kind of aura of their having been there, with a minimal physical expression. Both groups believe that forest spirits have the role of guardians of the forest, punishing those who misbehave in relation to the living environment. In a region where no systematic archaeological study has been undertaken, the team has identified a wide range of funerary monuments, settlement forms, and other landscape constructions dating to the last 1000 years, some of the locations being linked by origin myths and genealogies to the present-day Kelabit. Sediment cores were taken for pollen analysis (to reconstruct past vegetation, and human impacts on it) from a number of locations in the northern and southern Kelabit Highlands. Initial studies of the cores suggests that they will be a good guide to the intensity of land use in their localities in recent centuries, possibly back to c .1000 years ago, but the presence of much older charcoal washing into the core locations also suggests that the history of human activity in the Kelabit Highlands may be of much greater antiquity.

Year 2

The first highlight of the project in the reporting period has been the delivery of the first suite of radiocarbon (14C) dates on charcoal samples collected in the 2007 fieldwork by the Beta-Analytic and Belfast radiocarbon laboratories. They provide the first scientific evidence for the potential antiquity of human-landscape interactions in interior Borneo: they indicate that human occupation in the Kelabit Highlands stretches far beyond the Metal Age (the beginning of which in Borneo is commonly dated to around 500 BC), probably by several thousand years. Secondly, clear links are emerging between many of these places in the landscape – old settlements, cemeteries, megaliths and earthworks – and fo cal and api cal ancestors/culture heroes among the Kelabit, as well as both differences and parallels between their relationships with the forest and the landscape and those of the Penan.

Dr Janowski embarked on her next main phase of fieldwork in June, working with Kelabit in Sarawak cities and making a visit to nomadic and semi-settled Penan settlements in the upper Tutoh. She joined up with the rest of the team for the period of fieldwork in the Kelabit Highlands. The second season of fieldwork by the full team, in August 2008, focused on both Bario in the northern Highlands and Pa' Dalih in the southern Highlands . Dr. Janowski, Dr. Barton and Prof. Gosden also made a visit to the Kelabit settlement of Long Peluan and the nearby Penan settlement of Long Beruang, outside the Highlands proper. Extensive auguring and recording of exposed sections indicated that the Bario basin has a long and complex development history, as yet undated, which most likely reflects various combinations of climate, anthropogenic activity, vegetation change, river behaviour and slope processes. In the southern Highlands , resistivity and magnetometer surveys (the first in tropi cal rainforest?) were undertaken at a series of archaeologi cal sites identified in the first season, to characterise their spatial extent and to search for buried structures. Excavations were undertaken at three main sites sampled in 2007: an enigmatic habitation site we explored in 2007 dated by C14 to c. AD 400; a ceremonial mound ( pereupun ); and a stone jar cemetery with gravegoods of the 14 th -16 th centuries AD. The anthropologi cal studies were extended from the genealogi cal work to the social networks and relationships represented by Kelabit material culture, from basketry obtained from Penan to the plants in house gardens, and work also continued with both the Kelabit and the Penan on aspects of their relationships to the forest, particularly through forest spirits. The anthropologi cal, archaeologi cal, and environmental datasets are being integrated into a single GIS framework to facilitate the archiving, analysis, and dissemination of the project's findings.