Confirmation of an Early Date for the Presence of Rice in Borneo.
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THE SARAWAK MUSEUM JOURNAL |
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Title :
Confirmation of an Early Date for the Presence of Rice in Borneo. |
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Author :
Paul Beavitt, Edmund Kurui and Jill Thompson |
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Abstract:
Examination by Dr. Peter Bellwood and Ipoi Datan in 1989 of sherds of pottery from the cave site of Gua Sireh in Sarawak, indicated that husks had been used as a temper which had been added to clay to prevent breakage during the firing process. A rice grain was also found as an accidental inclusion in pottery from an earlier phase at the site. When dated by the technique known as Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), this revealed a surprisingly early date for the presence of rice in the Equatorial and Island part of South-East Asia (Ipoi and Bellwood, 1991, Bellwood et al 1992). This date was 3850+260 B.P.,or a mean date of 2334 B.C. if calibrated (CAMS 725). In many ways this very early date is surprising for Borneo given that traditions and historical accounts indicate that much of the population was dependent on hunting wild animals and eating wild sago until a relatively short time ago. The spread of rice cultivation was thought thus to have been largely a phenomenon of the last five hundred years, and in many interior areas only of the last fifty years. There is indeed still a significant present-day population of hunter-gatherers living in the interior forests.
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| DOI: XXXX |
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How to cite:
Paul Beavitt et al. (1996). Confirmation of an Early Date for the Presence of Rice in Borneo. The Sarawak Museum Journal, L (71): 67-76 |
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References
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