50,000 Years of Stone Age Culture 

 in Borneo^ 



By Tom Harrisson, D.S.O., O.B.E. 



Government Ethnologist and Curator of The Museum 

 Kuching, Sarawak 



[With 4 plates] 



When I had the privilege of becoming curator of the Sarawak 

 Museum in 194Y, no systematic archeology had been done in the island 

 of Borneo and most of the published material on its prehistory was 

 speculative or even subjective. Slowly, in the past 16 years, we have 

 been able to accumulate an organized body of fact, starting m Sarawak 

 itself, and subsequently extending to Brmiei and in a preliminary way 

 to Sabah (North Borneo). 



We have reached down to the level of beyond 50,000 B.C. in our 

 excavation of the Great Cave at Niah. But in considering prehistory 

 in the context of a place like Borneo, it is necessary to recognize that 

 as well as extending far back into the past it continues, living, in the 

 present. 



It is not possible to understand the living cultures of Borneo 

 today without tracing back through their history into prehistory. 

 This history (among peoples who until recently were really illiterate) 

 is nevertheless firmly held in a most elaborate sung and spoken folklore. 

 In this folklore, past events are often identified with specific persons, 

 places, and numbers of generations back from the present. Though 

 subject to even more error and argument than the work of Western his- 

 torians, recent work in Borneo has shown that there is a great deal 

 of objective value in this folk material; a considerable part of our 

 Museiun energies has been expended in collecting what is left of it, 

 before the great old singers and story-tellers die out. 



In several cases, we have followed up folk tales by actual excavation, 

 and proved an association between spoken words and things in the 



^ Read to the Commonwealth Section of the Royal Society of Arts, on November 28, 

 1963, and subsequently awarded a Prince Philip Medal. Prom the Journal of the Royal 

 Society of Arts, vol. 112, No. 5091, pp. 174-191, 1964. Reprinted with revisions by 

 permission of the Royal Society of Arts. 



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