Long-Distance Obsidian Trade in Indonesia
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*Department of Anthropology, U. of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, [email protected] **Pusat Penyelidikan Arkeologi Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia
ABSTRACT Long-distance trade in obsidian from sources in the southwest Pacific has been well-documented for the Lapita culture complex, beginning about 1600 BC. Analyses of obsidian artifacts from recent excavations at Bukit Tengkorak in southeastern Sabah (Borneo, Malaysia) indicate the use of obsidian from multiple sources in Melanesia as early as the 5th millennium BC. The archaeological presence of obsidian, up to more than 3500 km from its source, is the surviving evidence of what was almost certainly the longest Neolithic trade route in the world. In addition, these results indicate that long-distance trade networks existed in Indonesia at least 2500 years prior to the Lapita culture, and strengthen hypotheses of its origins in southeast Asia.
INTRODUCTION Obsidian is a natural volcanic glass, typically of rhyolitic composition and without any significant crystalline structure, which was widely used for prehistoric stone tools because of its conchoidal fracture and extremely sharp cutting edges. Obsidian is formed only under certain geological conditions and the number of sources in a single geographic region which are suitable for stone tool manufacture is limited. The combination of a homogeneous chemical composition within individual obsidian sources and a restricted number of potentially exploitable sources almost always permits the confident attribution of an archaeological artifact to a single geological source using modem instrumental methods of elemental analysis, at least in regions where the geological sources are known and well-characterized. Numerous provenance studies of archaeological obsidian have demonstrated the long-distance 'trade' of this material while the resulting distribution patterns are usually interpreted in terms of prehistoric sociopolitical and economic systems [1]. Obsidian source lists and relevant information are maintained by the International Association for Obsidian Studies on the World Wide Web [2]. At least 66 obsidian sources exist in the southwest Pacific, and these have been studied, analyzed and catalogued over the last 20 years by J.R. Bird and his colleagues at the Australian Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation's Lucas Heights Research Laboratories in Sydney [3-12]. Some obsidian sources were locally exploited as early as 20,000 BP; the most expansive use of obsidian, however, seems to have occurred during the period when Lapita voyagers colonized the eastern Melanesian and Polynesian islands and brought obsidian and pottery-making skills with them [9,13]. The distribution of obsidian from a 'homelands' area in New Britain and the Bismarck Archipelago, eastwards to Fiji [14], represents a linear distance of at least 3300 km. Lapita links to the west of New Guinea have been the subject of some debate, with some scholars favoring a predominantly Melanesian development of the Lapita
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