Three Seasons of Archaeological Survey in the Aru Islands, 1995–97

Abstract

Armed with the set of questions and issues discussed in Chapter 1, we arrived in Aru in 1995 and began a reconnaissance survey, which was continued in a more targeted way in 1996 and 1997. In each year, a considerable amount of time was spent liaising with kepala desa (village leaders, Bahasa Indonesian) and communities, towards a thorough explanation of our objectives and in order to identify any known sites. After travelling to the various islands from the kecamatan (district capital), Dobo, the general strategy was to carry out formal discussions and interviews, address adat (customary law) issues, and then carry out surveys and site inspections with community representatives. Initial reconnaissance surveys in 1995 were focussed on the northwest islands as these lay closest to the edge of the Continental Shelf. As discussed in Chapter 1, we had hoped they might provide stratified sites with old and continuous occupation sequences, perhaps going back to the earliest period of human occupation of Aru. These islands comprised Kobroor, Wamar, Wokam, Ujir and Wasir (Fig. 4.1). Most of the geological formations surveyed on these islands were found to be unsuitable for cave or rockshelter formation. Where caves were found, they were either posttransgression sea caves of recent origin in soft sedimentary rock or contained running water and thus were unsuitable for human occupation. Our initial strategy to target cave sites on the northwestern islands closest to the edge of the Continental Shelf, in the hope of finding evidence of Pleistocene occupation, thus proved unsuccessful. Suitable caves in this part of Aru appear to be restricted to the karst formations, which mainly occur in the interior of the larger islands and are away from early shorelines. In 1995 only one cave with clear excavation potential was located. This was Liang Lemdubu (Site 9), the focus

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