New engraving finds in Alor Island, Indonesia extend known distribution of engravings in Oceania

Highlights

• New engraving sites discovered in Alor Island, Indonesia include figurative and geometric motifs with some combining cupules.

• Alor Island motifs bear comparison with engravings to the west in mainland Southeast Asia and to the east in Near Oceania.

• These new finds demonstrate that potentially large numbers of engravings remain to be discovered in Indonesia.

Abstract

Engraving sites are rare in mainland and Island Southeast Asia and few examples have been identified in the Indonesian islands. Here we report three new engraving locales in Alor Island, Indonesia. The engravings are executed on boulders and in shelters and include figurative and geometric motifs, some combining cupules. Motifs incorporating cupules occur widely in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Near Oceania but have not previously been reported to the west in Indonesia. The Alor engraving sites thus extend the known distribution of cupule-based motifs to the west. These recent finds also indicate that the paucity of engravings found in the islands of eastern Indonesia is likely due to the comparatively few archaeological surveys conducted in this region.

Introduction

Engraving sites are rare in mainland and Island Southeast Asia and few examples have been identified in the Indonesian islands (see Tan, 2014 for an overview). Specht (1979:63) drew attention to a west versus east division in the distribution of engraving and pigment in Oceania, with pigment art dominating in mainland Papua New Guinea (PNG) and to the west in Island Southeast Asia, and engravings dominating to the east in Near and Remote Oceania. Specht (1979:74) also thought that engravings were predominantly executed in open coastal locations on igneous boulders or rock walls near water, and “never in caves or shelters”. He also drew attention to the fact that despite the deep prehistory of Near Oceania the engravings showed a high co-occurrence with areas where Austronesian languages were spoken and thus defined the tradition of engraving as “the Austronesian Engraving Style”. While acknowledging differences in the distribution of engraved and painted art, Wilson and Ballard's (in press) recent analysis found more overlap in motif type between engraving and painting traditions in parts of the western Pacific than had previously been recognized. They questioned whether the choice of these artistic techniques might to some extent be “governed by the geological availability of rock surface types, with painted galleries occurring where limestone cliff faces are present, from eastern Indonesia to Fiji while engravings predominate where the principal canvases are boulder fields, volcanic flows and beach platforms, as in much of Polynesia”. Here we report the significant find of a number of new engravings sites in Alor Island, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, which extends the previously known distribution of engraving sites.

Alor is one of a group of islands known as the Lesser Sunda Islands (Fig. 1). It is east of the Wallace Line and thus has not been connected with continental Sunda, although at times of lowered sea levels, such as during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), it was merged with neighbouring Pantar, Pura, Marisa, Rusa, Ternate and Treweng islands, forming a single landmass of approximately 3800 km² (O'Connor et al., 2017). Alor has a Pleistocene occupation record (Samper Carro et al., 2017, Samper Carro et al., 2016); thus there is the potential for Pleistocene rock art on this island.

Earlier regional syntheses of painted rock art have included Timor, Alor's neighbouring island to the south, as within the ‘western Pacific’ (Ballard, 1992:94). Wilson (2002:10), for example, defined the western Pacific as including the area from Timor in the west to Tonga and Samoa in the east. Wilson and Ballard's (in press) recent synthesis of the rock art of Oceania is the geographically broadest yet undertaken, and includes both pigment art and engravings. They define Oceania as encompassing the islands from Island Southeast Asia in the west, to Micronesia and Hawai'i in the north, Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) to the south, and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to the east. In order to allow for the greatest cross-regional comparison, we follow Wilson and Ballard (in press) in considering Alor as geographically part of Oceania. However, we include discussion of engraving sites in southern parts of continental Asia such as southern China, the islands of Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as mainland Southeast Asia as this geographic region is potentially highly relevant in terms of cultural and/or stylistic transmissions into the islands of Indonesia. We have limited our discussion to engravings on boulders and shelter/cave walls and have excluded carvings in the round such as statuary, and engravings on megaliths which are humanly placed rocks.