The Cultured Rainforest Project: The Second (2008) Field Season

Abstract

The paper describes the second season of fieldwork in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, East Malaysia, by the Cultured Rainforest Project,a team of anthropologists, archaeologists, and geographers investigating the long-term and present-day interactions between people (Penan hunter-gatherers and Kelabit farmers) and rainforest. Further data have been gathered about Penan and Kelabit genealogies, settlement histories, attitudes to forest spirits, and on the complicated ways in which the acquisition, use, and discard of material culture, including plants, mediates relations between people and forest, and between people. The archaeological fieldwork concentrated on further investigations of settlement and cemetery sites shown to be promising in the 2007 exploratory fieldwork. At Long Kelit in the Upper Kelapang valley, geophysical survey, complemented by excavation, revealed a pre-modern longhouse at Ruma Ma’on Dakah and an adjacent palisaded enclosure (Ruma Ma’on Taa Payo) likely to date to the first millennium AD and of a form for which there are no contemporaryor recent (historically-or orally-documented) analogues. Excavation also demonstrated the complex construction and use history of a perupun or ceremonial stone mound at Long Kelit and of a megalithic stone jar cemetery at nearby Menatoh Long Diit used by Kelabit in living memory as well as in an earlier, pre-recorded, past. Palaeoenvironmental fieldwork established a preliminary geomorphological framework of landforms and their likely relationships to land use histories being constructed from pollencores.

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