Two millennia of socio-cultural development in Luwu, South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

The project ‘Origins of Complex Society in South Sulawesi’ has recorded some fifty sites contemporary with the meteoric rise of the chiefdom of Luwu between AD 1300 and 1600. Six earlier sites, dated between 2000 and 900 years ago, trace the first importation to this region of glass beads and other exotic goods, the discovery of Luwu's sources of high-grade iron ore, and the genesis of a local smelting technology. These formative developments probably preceded any substantial migration of Bugis-speaking people to Luwu. Hence the Luwu chiefdom developed on a previously established, non-Bugis economic basis. Luwu was not the oldest of the Bugis chiefdoms, but it does provide our first evidence of the aggressive organizational skills for which the Bugis became renowned in later times.

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