522 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



ground. By and large, this folk information can be regarded as 

 having a varying but appreciable validity up to 20 generations back, 

 especially among people like the Kenyahs and Sea Dayaks, who use 

 remarkable aide-memoires — in the form of marked planks — to refresh 

 the compositions of successive generations. After about 20 genera- 

 tions, 1 or 2 generations may represent centuries, and we move back, 

 usually, into a world of spirits and psychoses. Nevertheless, even in 

 this twilight of remembered thought, it is possible to identify distinct 

 major events, such as the advent of Islam in the 14th century; the 

 impact of great Hindu figures earlier than that; and the impact of 

 iron early in the Chinese impacts of the T'ang dynasty. 



I first became directly conscious of this stone age element in the 

 present when I landed, by parachute, among the Kelabits in the far 

 interior during the Japanese [Second World] War. They were then 

 at the very end of an actual stone age — such as still persists on a 

 massive scale in parts of Central New Guinea. They were still using 

 stone hammers on stone anvils to beat out crude irons for their rice 

 hoes and jungle knives. Among their most valued cult objects were 

 peculiar conical stones, which I now believe represent pomiders for 

 root crops and other purposes completely lost since the arrival of rice. 

 These people have lived above the 3,000-foot level in the remotest part 

 of the island, less disturbed than any others in this constantly dynamic 

 and changing island population. I also saw then, and have explored 

 since, extensive systems of upland irrigation in remote areas and a 

 tremendously impressive range of megalithic monuments, some of 

 them junior Stonehenges, standing days of walking away in the jungle. 



For these and many other "mysteries," the Kelabits have extensive 

 explanations in their folklore. Following up these cult objects of 

 stone, one finds they are common to many Borneo peoples. But none 

 of the others have conical pounders. Among the Kenyahs and Kayans 

 of Sarawak and Kalimantan, another form of adz is characteris- 

 tically kept and believed to be a magical thunderbolt. Farther north, 

 among some of the Sabah people, the earlier findings of the late I. H. N. 

 Evans are extensively confirmed by further collection. There he found 

 small squared adzes and some remarkable gouges, cigar-shaped and 

 nearly a foot long. Along the coast and southwest, we find even more 

 peculiar stone tools (since published in Man) . 



Without elaborating on this to the extent of confusion, patterns of 

 different stone age cultures (in a simple technological sense) can be 

 mapped over different areas of the island. But, of course, with the 

 mobility of many of the groups — even in historic times for the Sea 

 Dayks and others — it does not follow that the tools now found in this 

 way within any area were originally used there. They may well have 

 been brought from another island, millennia ago. 



