The Cultured Rainforest Project Archaeological Investigations in the Third (2009) Season of Fieldwork in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak

Abstract

This paper describes archaeological fieldwork carried out in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak between June and August 2009 (Figs. 1, 2). This work comprised the archaeological component of third and final season of the Cultured Rainforest Project, a project that is seeking to chart the great time-depth of human action that has shaped the rainforests of Southeast Asia, and to reveal its changing character (Barker et al., 2008, 2009). The project involves a collaboration of disciplines, with anthropologists and historians providing a detailed picture of human-rainforest relations today and in the recent past, and archaeologists and palaeoecologists teasing out sequences of long-term landscape change. The Kelabit Highlands have been selected as the case study because they are inhabited today by both rice farmers (Kelabit people) and hunter-gatherers in the process of settling down (Penan). The antiquity of rice growing and the role of other crops in the past in highland Borneo were unknown before the project, thougha wide range of (undated) archaeological monuments implied that human habitation in the forest here might be of some antiquity.

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