Rainforest Foraging and Farming in Island Southeast Asia：50 Millennia of Prehistory at the Niah Caves, Borneo
东南亚岛屿雨林的狩猎采集与农业：婆罗洲岛尼亚洞穴五万年的历史
Graeme Barker 格雷姆·巴克
University of Cambridge 英国剑桥大学
尼亚洞穴位于马来西亚东部砂拉越婆罗洲北部海岸200米高的石灰岩地区Gunung Subis。悬崖上密布洞穴和裂缝，但这个洞穴区以大教堂形状的大洞为最重要特征。 这个多窟多入口的大洞穴长约900米，宽600米，高达100米。大洞穴位于尼亚国家公园的中心，那里是一个原生雨林和次生热带雨林岛，现在有很多棕榈油种植园，占据了砂拉越沿海的大部分地区。 二十世纪五六十年代汤姆和芭芭拉·哈里森在大洞穴入口处，特别是西口的入口处进行的系列发掘及其重要发现，使得该洞穴在东南亚考古学中具有标志性地位。 这里最引人注目的发现就是1958年的一个解剖学上的现代人类头盖骨，被称为“深头骨”，取样于头骨临近的木炭，经测年为距今约4万年前，是当时世界上最早的智人化石。 此“深头骨”和其他颅后遗存都是出土于哈里森所称的“频繁地带”，这是一个约2米的生业活动遗迹，时期为晚更新世和全新世早期。更高处是数百个出土新石器时代和金属时代陶器的墓葬，这是东南亚最大的史前墓地。直到几年前人类发现的与其相似的斯里兰卡深头骨古人类化石遗迹为止，尼亚大洞穴是非洲和澳大利亚之间唯一一处能够提供支持现代人类从非洲扩散到澳大利亚这一“南方之路”的有化石证据的遗址。
哈里森及其合作者发表了许多关于他们发掘结果的文章，但由于各种原因无法把这些研究集中在一起形成最终的报告，所以关于他们的发现仍然存在许多问题，特别是关于“深头骨”的时代。 这正是2000年开始由考古学、地理学家和其他环境科学家组成的跨学科团队对洞穴进行详细的调查的原因。调查的重点是人类使用洞穴的历史以及它所处的气候和环境背景。
新的发掘主要集中在西口，但是我们也在大洞穴的其它入口处及哈里森曾发掘过的小洞穴周边等地进行了发掘。我们在尼亚的称为“尼亚洞穴工程”的新工作，目的是解决三个主要的研究问题。首先，人类在洞穴中的居住时间究竟有多古老，特别是“深头骨”的年代。其次，晚更新世时期的山洞周围是否有热带雨林？如果是的话，第一批现代人类是否有能力在其中居住？（在过去的十年中，人类学家和考古学家之间就采集者是否能够生活在热带雨林中进行了激烈的辩论，因为没有驯化农业，又无法与邻近的农耕者贸易。）第三，采集经济何时并在什么情况下让位于农耕经济？第三个问题是检验一个被广泛接受的理论，也就是新石器时代从台湾乃至从中国大陆来的殖民者给东南亚岛屿带来了农业（包括新时期时代物质文化、水稻和猪的引进）。
主要的田野工作是在2000-2003年进行。田野工作获取的材料，以及以前哈里森发掘的丰富材料，一直是研究小组的重点。这些材料包括成千上万的动物骨碎片、陶片和贝壳、数百人骨骼、石制品、骨制品、木制品，珠子和纺织品碎片。研究小组由博士生、博士后和研究员组成。早期的发掘工作，西口和其它洞穴入口的大部分考古遗迹都被移除，所以我们开始尽可能小规模的挖掘，收集我们所需要的信息，以使项目结束时考古遗存尽可能依旧完好。我们对哈里森在西口和其他入口发掘的探沟的表面进行了清理，以现代标准做了记录，收集了各种各样的沉积物样品，用于测年、观察气候指标如提取诸如花粉和植硅石。在深头骨发现点附近留下的剖面墙被完全揭露出来，尤其是发现了可表明首批到达该地点的人类生存活动的动物和植物遗存。在新石器时代的墓地，我们进行了特殊墓葬的小规模挖掘，以调查丧葬行为。就此次项目出版的两本专著——《东南亚的雨林觅食和农业：砂拉越尼亚洞穴考古》、《砂拉越尼亚洞穴的考古学调查》，共有75位学者参与。正是他们的辛勤工作，获得此次荣誉表彰。
我们在西口的地貌学研究揭示了需为我们所认知的过去53万年间人类极其复杂的系列活动。洞穴后面的一个天然盆地布满了四种主要的沉积物类型或岩相。在底部是褐色和红色泥岩（岩相2），这是由洞穴内部流入盆地的水流形成的，据推测与湿润期有关。这些混杂的沉积物是从洞口沉降、滑落和被冲下来的物质。在这些沉积岩相（木炭，灰烬，动物骨、石器等）中都发现了人类活动痕迹，特别是与古岩相表面有关的痕迹，表明人类是间歇存在的而不是连续的存在。牛津实验室的木炭样本显示，这些活动发生在大约50，000——35，000年前的时间范围内。岩相2和岩相2C被汤姆·哈里森（Tom Harrisson）称为“粉红色和白色”的考古无用沉积物（岩相3）所盖住，他认为这种沉积物（岩相3）历经千万年蝙蝠鸟粪（粉红色）和洞顶石灰石碎片（白色）的不断堆积形成。但事实上，它们是由洞穴内部的突然崩塌引起的，可能持续了几分钟、几小时或几天，大概发生在三万五千年前。覆盖在“粉红色和白色”之上的是棕色粉土和厚厚的灰烬堆积物，具有丰富的人类存在证据，被称为岩相4，放射性碳测年表明它们形成于晚更新世和全新世早期。中、晚全新世的主要沉积物是蝙蝠粪和鸟粪。
洞穴沉积物中的气候和环境变化序列与为北半球（海洋同位素阶段4-1）的间冰期（暖/湿）、冰期（冷/干）事件序列同步。在间冰期，海平面高度直达洞穴，而在大约2万年前的“最后的冰河时代”等冰期阶段，低降的海平面使得沿海平原从当前的构造扩大了100多公里。在间冰期阶段，有一片茂密的热带雨林与今天的相似，而冰期阶段的特点是更干燥、更开阔，但仍以森林为主，其中包括目前生长在海拔1000米以上的山地植物和动物物种。 两阶段的过渡阶段是干旱灌丛，干低地混交林和山地森林的混合地貌。
我们能够在这个大约三万七千年前的、属于成年女性的“深头骨”上获得直接的铀系列年代。这令人惊讶，因为我们已经从头颅上方20-50厘米的沉积物中获得了约40，000-45,000年前的日期，而我们认为这就是头骨发现的地方。我们对附着在头骨上的沉积物及其中的花粉分析发现，它们是埋藏头骨深度处和头骨上方处沉积物的混合物质。伴随头骨发现的一些四肢骨头，使我们得出这样的结论：这可能是某种二次埋葬，有一个挖的坑（没有被原来的发掘者注意到）和埋藏其中的一些脱臼骨头、头骨，导致头骨上粘附了岩相2和沉积物4的混合物。头骨沉积物中有一个有趣的发现是石英晶体，这些石英晶体来自数百英里外的花岗岩，包括海拔4000米以上的京那巴鲁山山顶。很难想象这些亮丽的水晶是如何通过人类的手段到达尼亚的。
智人几乎可以肯定是解剖学意义上的现代人类，他们至少在五万年前经常到这个洞穴里去，并且显然能够成功地在雨林中生活。他们的石器技术，就像在东南亚的其他上更新世遗址一样，几乎完全是由当地可用的石头（主要是河卵石）组成。对这些“简单”石片表面附着的微痕使用磨损和有机残留物的研究，为基础工艺技术的重要性提供了强有力的间接证据。它们有各种功用，包括刮削和切割坚硬的材料，如骨头和木材（抛光与切割或片切一些材料，如竹和藤）是一致的，还有利用在软的植物材料上，切割或刮树脂等。除了树脂之外，工具上的有机残留物包括鸟羽毛碎片、植物纤维组织和淀粉颗粒，这表明石器工具被用于许多工作中，包括加工可食物植物，屠宰哺乳动物和鸟类以及或许手工活如制篮。从一开始，人们也喜欢把骨头和猪牙制作做成尖状器、各种刮刀和穿孔工具，通过它们的使用高度磨损痕迹可以判断它们被大量使用并保养。与当时非洲和欧亚大陆的狩猎采集者相较之下，东南亚的第一批现代人类可能只能接触到不堪造就的岩石原料，但是他们发展出的的石器使用技术和许多其他可用材料的技术工艺却非常复杂。
在尼亚，第一批狩猎者捕猎野猪，以及各种各样的大型和小型猎物，包括在林冠高处的如猩猩、猕猴、叶猴和在地上的水鹿、麂、豪猪、太阳熊、穿山甲、甚至犀牛。他们能够追捕这些，因为洞穴的位置使人们可以步行进入包括河岸森林、低地热带雨林、山地雨林、甚至山地植被在内的多种环境。同样的环境多样性意味着他们可以从河流、溪流、池塘和沼泽中收集可食用的软体动物。主要掠食物种的杀戮时间意味着猎人们使用陷阱和网罗来捕捉它们。屠杀证据最有趣的方面之一是适用于不同动物的差异，这在功能方面难以解释，例如涉及特定骨骼的机械性能，暗示这些早期现代人类对动物世界的分类与我们现在的生物分类有很大不同。
石器上的淀粉颗粒和宏观的植物遗存，如浮选法收集的植物薄壁组织（纤维组织），表明这些热带雨林采集者也在收获丰富的雨林植物资源，特别是坚果、果实和块茎。后者包括山药和棕榈，例如西米，为婆罗洲热带雨林中的现代槟榔觅食者提供主要碳水化合物的植物。其中一些植物性食物是高毒性的，最显著的发现之一是人们已经学会了如何通过将有毒的植物和坚果埋在灰烬坑中来释放毒素，以使它们可食用，这是澳大利亚热带原住民使用的一种技术。爵床花粉和木炭的高峰值正好与人类活动的事件一致，表明了从一开始，这些人也燃烧森林，以制造或扩大平整的空间，可能是为了促进他们自己想要的块茎等植物的生长，这也将导致竞争。在新几内亚内陆地区，发现了大约五万年前与人类生业活动有关的森林燃烧的类似证据。 “水稻栽培”和“树木栽培”这两个术语是为了描述在稻作农业发展数千年前的全新世早期，在东南亚岛屿实行的森林管理制度。尼亚的证据暗示，这些行为可能具有更深层次的古代风俗习惯，包含了现代智人首次遇到的在热带雨林中的生存问题并在此基础上所培养的部分非凡技能。
西口处厚厚的灰烬堆积，说明末次盛冰期后，洞穴使用的频率和特点明显加强，因为茂密的热带雨林在洞穴周围生长起来。基础技艺变得越来越重要，包括带把的复合工具投射器，例如两根带有纤维和树脂的黄貂鱼鱼钩。这些和其他投射器的轻便性表明，它们可能主要被设计成鱼叉，尽管长矛和弓箭也被用于狩猎。 （在全新世时期，吹管出现得很晚，晚至金属工具出现时）。在全新世早期人们在大洞穴的其他入口处露营，但是西口被用作墓地。丧葬习俗是很多样化的：部分身体的埋葬方式同“深头骨”女性相同，或直肢埋葬，或似胎儿的弯曲姿势，头部有时与身体分离，有时甚至身体放在坑底部的火上。人们继续靠森林觅食而生活，花粉记录表明它们对洞穴周围的景观继续产生重大影响。
在海水围绕着这些洞穴的中全新世几千年的间隔之后，具备新石器时代物质文化、并与具备和之前同样体质人类学特征的人们，在四千年前重返尼亚埋葬尸体。他们使用的墓葬形式最初与全新世早期的相似，但在年龄和性别等社会范畴上有更加明确的区分，并可能涉及对直接祖先的崇拜。他们一边小规模地种植水稻，一边进行传统的觅食和“植物栽培”（植物管理），但几个世纪后他们放弃了稻田耕作，也没有家养牲畜。我们的研究结果适合一个新兴的学术体系，这个学术体系越来越怀疑4000年前台湾航海耕作者的海上播布的“南岛假说”；这一体系强调新型社会关系和意识形态的重要性，这些新型社会关系可能通过海上联络网将东南亚大陆、东南亚岛和美拉尼西亚的沿海聚落联系起来。
在“金属时代”，也就是距今2000-500年前或公元 0-1500年，许多尼亚洞穴仍被用作墓地。通过包含了东南亚大陆、印度和中国的贸易网络，尼亚洞穴人获得了异国特征的随葬物（陶器、玻璃珠、贝制品和金属制品）。人们继续以森林觅食、植物培育和养猪等小规模农业为生，并在过去1000年收集金丝燕与中国商人进行贸易。 奇怪的是，尽管尼亚人对大米已经有数千年的认识，但近几个世纪，大米才成为他们的主食。
尼亚洞穴项目的主要成果是，婆罗洲的热带雨林至少在5万年前已由人类塑造和管理。从西非、中美洲和亚马逊河流域等世界其他地区也可以看到类似的热带雨林历史，但尼亚洞穴的“考古历史”是最长和最丰富的，一位评论家将其描述为（《世界考古》，2015年） “在重建人类热带雨林生存觅食策略的背景下，全球无与伦比”。今天，婆罗洲的皮南采集者正在践行他们所说的“molong”或“地景培植”，例如通过去除周边竞争植物来保护西米棕榈。 尼亚洞穴的证据表明，雨林管理策略可能从人类开始接触雨林就开始了，这一发现对当今热带雨林保护理论和实践有重大影响，当今的雨林保护理论和实践的假设是直到过去100-200年间人们才开始对雨林的原始环境产生重大影响。
The Niah Caves lie within the Gunung Subis, a 200-metre high limestone massif near the northern coast of Borneo in Sarawak, East Malaysia. The cliffs of the Gunung Subis are riddled with caves and fissures, but the system is dominated by the cathedral-like Great Cave. Multi-chambered and multi-entranced, the Great Cave measures some 900 m by 600 m and soars to a height of c.100 m. The caves are at the centre of Niah National Park, an island of primary and secondary rainforest in the middle of what is now a sea of palm-oil plantation covering much of this part of coastal Sarawak. The caves have iconic status in the archaeology of Island Southeast Asia as a result of the excavations by Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s in a series of entrances to the Great Cave but especially in the West Mouth. Their most spectacular discovery here, in 1958, was that of an anatomically modern human cranium referred to as the ‘Deep Skull’ that was dated by adjacent charcoal to around 40,000 years ago, making it at the time the earliest Homo sapiens fossil in the world. The Deep Skull and other post-cranial remains were part of some 2 m of occupation debris termed by the Harrissons the ‘frequentation zone’ and dated by them to the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. Higher up were hundreds of graves associated with Neolithic and Metal Age pottery, the largest prehistoric cemetery in Island Southeast Asia. Until the discovery a few years ago of Homo sapiens fossil remains of similar antiquity to the Deep Skull in Sri Lanka, Niah Great Cave was the only site between Africa and Australia providing direct fossil evidence in support of the theory of the ‘Southern Route’ of dispersal of modern humans from Africa to Australia.
The Harrissons and their collaborators published many articles on the results of their excavations but for a variety of reasons were not able to bring the work together in a final report so many questions remained about their discoveries, especially regarding the age of the Deep Skull. This was the context for a detailed reinvestigation of the caves beginning in 2000 by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, geographers, and other environmental scientists. The focus has been on the human occupation history of the caves and the climatic and environmental contexts in which it was situated.
The new work focussed on the West Mouth, but we also undertook excavations in other entrances to the Great Cave and in other smaller caves in the vicinity that had been explored by the Harrissons. The Niah Caves Project, as the new work at Niah has been termed, set out to address three main research questions. First, how old was human presence in the caves, and the Deep Skull in particular? Second, was there rainforest around the cave in the Late Pleistocene, and if so, were the first modern humans capable of living in it? (There had been a rigorous debate in the previous decade amongst anthropologists and archaeologists about whether foragers could live in rainforest without recourse to trading with neighbouring farmers, given the dearth of plant staples.) Third, when and in what circumstances did foraging give way to farming? The context of the third question was to test the widely-accepted theory that farming was introduced to Island Southeast Asia by Neolithic colonists from Taiwan and ultimately mainland China who brought with them Neolithic material culture and domestic rice and pigs.
The main fieldwork took place in 2000-2003 and the materials from this work, along with the prolific archive of the Harrisson excavations that includes hundreds of thousands of animal bone fragments, many thousands of pot sherds and shells, hundreds of human skeletons, and numerous artefacts of stone, bone and wood, beads, and textile fragments, have been the focus of study ever since by a team of PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and senior collaborators. The earlier excavations removed most of the archaeological sediments in the West Mouth and other cave entrances, so we set out to undertake as small-scale excavations as possible to collect the kind of information we needed, so as to leave the archaeology as intact as possible at the end of the project. The faces of the Harrisson trenches in the West Mouth and other entrances were cleaned and recorded to modern standards, and a wide variety of sediment samples was collected for dating purposes and for the extraction of climate proxies such as pollen and phytoliths. A baulk or section wall remaining near the findspot of the Deep Skull was completely excavated in particular for faunal and botanical remains indicative of the subsistence activities of the first visitors to the site. Small-scale excavations were undertaken of particular burials in the Neolithic cemetery to investigate funerary behaviour. In total around 75 scholars have contributed to the two monographs published on the project: Rainforest Foraging and Farming in Island Southeast Asia: the Archaeology of the Niah Caves, Sarawak (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph 2013, 410 pp., ISBN 978-1-902937-54-0, edited by Graeme Barker) and Archaeological Investigations in the Niah Caves, Sarawak (Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monograph 2016, 562 pp. and 339 pp. Supplementary Materials, ISBN 978-1-902937-60-1). It is their work that has deserved the accolade of this award.
Our geomorphological studies in the West Mouth revealed an extremely complex sequence of events over the past c.53,000 years within which the human activity has to be understood. A natural basin behind the cave lip was filled with four major sediment types or lithofacies. At the base were brown and red silts (Lithofacies 2) formed by episodes of water flowing into the basin from the cave interior, presumed to relate to more humid phases. Interleaved with these sediments were colluvial sediments formed by materials slumping, sliding and washing down from the cave mouth (Lithofacies 2C). Traces of human activity were found in both lithofacies (charcoal, ash, animal bone, stone tools etc), especially associated with palaeosurfaces indicating intermittent rather than continuous presence. Charcoal samples dated by the Oxford laboratory indicate a timescale within which these visits took place of c.50,000-35,000 years ago. Lithofacies 2 and 2C were capped by archaeologically-sterile sediments (Lithofacies 3) termed ‘pink and white’ by Tom Harrisson that he thought had been formed over thousands of years as a steady drizzle of bat guano (the pink) and limestone fragments (the white) from the cave roof, but in fact they resulted from a sudden avalanche of wet guano from the cave interior that may have lasted for just minutes, hours or a few days, sometime around 35,000 years ago. Overlying the ‘pink and white’ were brown silts and thick accumulations of ash with abundant evidence of human presence, termed Lithofacies 4, radiocarbon dates indicating that they formed in the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. The main sediments of the Mid and Late Holocene are bat and bird guano.
The sequence of climatic and environmental change preserved in the cave sediments is synchronous with the sequence of interstadial (warm/wet) and stadial (cold/dry) events established for the northern hemisphere (Marine Isotope Stages 4-1). The sea came right up to the caves at the height of interstadial phases whereas in stadial phases such as the Last Glacial Maximum c.20,000 years ago, lowered sea levels enlarged the coastal plain by well over 100 kilometres from its present configuration. At the height of interstadial climatic phases there was dense tropical rainforest similar to today’s, whereas stadial phases were characterised by drier more open but still predominantly forested landscapes that included plant and animal species now present in the mountains 1000 metres above sea level. In between were phases with a mixture of dry scrub, dry lowland mixed forest and montane forest.
We were able to obtain a direct uranium-series date on the Deep Skull, which belonged to an adult female, of around 37,000 years ago. This was surprising because we had obtained dates of c.40-45,000 years ago from sediments c.20-50 cm above where we calculated it had been found. Our analyses of sediments adhering to the skull, and of the pollen in them, found that they were a mix of the kind of material we would have expected at the depth the skull was buried and the occupation sediments above it. The skull was found with some limb bones, and we conclude that it was probably a secondary burial of some kind, with a pit being dug down (not noticed by the original excavators) and some disarticulated bones and the skull placed in it, resulting in the mix of Lithofacies 2 and 4 sediments adhering to the skull. One intriguing find in the sediments from the skull were quartz crystals that derive from granite rocks hundreds of miles away, including on the summit of Mount Kinabalu 4000 m above sea level. It is difficult to imagine how these bright attractive crystals could have arrived at Niah except by human agency.
Hominins, almost certainly anatomically modern humans, were regularly visiting the caves from at least 50,000 years ago, and were clearly able to live successfully in rainforest. Their stone technologies, as at other Upper Pleistocene sites in island Southeast Asia, consist almost entirely of unretouched flakes of locally-available stone, mostly river pebbles. Studies of microscopic traces of use wear and organic residues attached to the surfaces of these ‘simple’ flakes provide strong circumstantial evidence for the importance of organic technologies. They were used for a variety of functions including scraping and cutting hard materials such as bone and wood (polish on several flakes is consistent with cutting or slicing materials such as bamboo and rattan), working soft plant material, and cutting or scraping tree resin. As well as resin, organic residues on the tools included bird feather fragments, plant cellulose tissues, and starch granules, indicating that the stone tools were being used for a variety of tasks including processing food plants, butchering mammals and birds, and perhaps craft activities such as basket making. From the outset people also fashioned pieces of bone and pig tusk into points and various kinds of scraping and piercing tools, the high levels of use wear indicating that they were intensively used and curated. The first modern humans in Island Southeast Asia may have had access only to unpromising lithic raw materials compared with, for example, contemporary hunter-gatherers in Africa and western Eurasia, but the technologies they developed using stone and the many other materials available to them in the forests were highly complex.
At Niah the first foragers hunted bearded pig as well as a wide variety of large and small prey including ones high in the forest canopy such as orang-utan, macaques, leaf monkeys and langurs, and, on the forest floor, sambar deer, muntjac, porcupine, sun bear, pangolin and even rhinoceros. They were able to hunt these because the location of the caves gave walking access to a mosaic of environments including riparian forest, lowland rainforest, hill rainforest, and even montane vegetation. The same mosaic meant they could collect edible molluscs from rivers, streams, ponds and swamps, where they also fished. The killing ages of the major prey species imply that the hunters used traps and snares to catch them. One of the most intriguing aspects of the butchery evidence is variability in the methods applied to different primates and viverrids that is difficult to explain in functional terms such as relating to the mechanical properties of particular bones, hinting that these early modern humans divided up the animal world very differently from our own Linnaean classifications.
Starch grains on the stone artefacts and macroscopic plant remains such as plant parenchyma (tissue) recovered by water flotation show that these forest foragers were also harvesting a rich suite of rainforest plant resources, especially nuts, fruits and tubers. The latter included yams and palms such as sago, the plant that provides the main carbohydrate for present-day Penan foragers in Bornean rainforests. Some of these plant foods are highly toxic, and one of the most remarkable discoveries was evidence that people had learnt how to extract the toxins by burying toxic plants and nuts in ash-filled pits to make them edible, a technique used by tropical Australian aborigines. Peaks in Justicia pollen and charcoal coinciding with the episodes of human activity suggest that from the outset these people were also burning forest to make or enlarge cleared spaces, presumably to encourage the growth of plants such as tubers, which they themselves wanted and which would also have attracted game. Similar evidence for forest burning associated with human occupations around 50,000 years ago has been found in interior New Guinea. The terms ‘vegeculture’ and ‘arboriculture’ have been proposed to describe the systems of forest management being practised in Island Southeast Asia in the Early Holocene thousands of years before rice agriculture developed. The Niah evidence hints that these behaviours may be of deeper antiquity, part of the remarkable suite of strategies developed by modern humans to live in rainforest as they first encountered it.
Thick deposits of ash in the West Mouth indicate that the frequency and character of occupation intensified significantly after the Last Glacial Maximum, as dense rainforest developed around the caves. Organic technologies became increasingly important and included hafted composite projectiles such as two stingray barbs still with fibres and resin attached. The lightness of these and other projectile heads suggests that they may have been mainly designed as fishing harpoons though spears and bows and arrows were also used for hunting. (The blow pipe came much later in the Holocene, when metal tools were available.) In the Early Holocene people camped in other entrances to the Great Cave but the West Mouth was used as a place of burial. Funerary norms were extraordinarily varied: parts of bodies were buried as the Deep Skull female had been, or whole bodies were laid out extended, or bent in the foetal position, sometimes with the head separated from the body, or even placed seated onto a fire at the base of a pit. People continued to live by forest foraging and the pollen record shows that they continued to have significant effects on the landscape around the cave.
After a gap of several thousand years in the Mid Holocene when the sea surrounded the caves, people with Neolithic material culture but of the same physical character as before returned to Niah around 4000 years ago to bury their dead. They used forms of burial that were at first like those of the Early Holocene but with social categories such as age and gender more clearly differentiated and likely involving the veneration of immediate and recent ancestors. They cultivated rice on a small scale alongside practising traditional forms of foraging and ‘vegeculture’ (plant management), but they abandoned rice cultivation after a few centuries, and did not have domestic livestock. Our findings fit an emerging body of scholarship that is increasingly sceptical of the ‘Austronesian hypothesis’ of a maritime dispersal of voyager-farmers from Taiwan c.4000 BP. They emphasize instead the likely importance of new kinds of social relations and possibly ideologies that linked the coastal communities of Mainland Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia and Melanesia through maritime networks of contact.
Many of the Niah Caves continued to be used as burial places in the ‘Metal Age’ c. 2000-500 BP or AD 0-1500. Exotic grave goods (pottery, glass beads, shell and metal artefacts) were obtained by participation in trading networks that linked Island Southeast Asia not just with Mainland Southeast Asia but India and China. People continued to live by a combination of forest foraging, vegeculture, and small-scale agriculture including keeping domestic pigs, and for the past 1000 years also collected swiftlet nests to trade with Chinese merchants. Extraordinarily, despite thousands of years of acquaintance with it, rice only became a staple food in recent centuries.
The headline result of the Niah Caves Project is that the rainforests of Borneo have been shaped and managed by people for at least 50,000 years. Rather similar rainforest histories are emerging from other parts of the world such as West Africa, Central America and the Amazon basin, but the Niah Caves’ ‘archaeological history’ is both the longest and richest, described by one reviewer (World Archaeology 2015) as “unsurpassed worldwide in the context of reconstructing…human rainforest subsistence foraging strategies”. Today Penan foragers in Borneo practise what they call ‘molong’ or ‘landscape nurturing’, for example protecting stands of sago palms by removing competitor vegetation from around them. The Niah Caves’ evidence suggests that rainforest management strategies may be more as old as our species’ engagement with them, a finding of significant implications for present-day rainforest conservation theory and practice based on the assumption that rainforests have been more or less pristine environments until people started to have significant impacts on them in the last 100-200 years.