524 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 64 



means of boring long straight holes through hardwood to provide that 

 wonderfully efficient weapon, the Bornean type of polished blowpipe, 

 which can shoot a dart accurately for long distances, including into 

 the forest canopy. The extensive evidence from analyses of the very 

 large quantities of food bone we have been recovering from the stone 

 age levels of the Niah cave (over a million pieces to date) underlines 

 how difficult it had previously been for man to hunt the rich fauna 

 of the highest jungle levels, and how much he tended to concentrate on 

 the terrestrial and lower arboreal. 



Nevertheless, there is much to show that through Borneo iron pro- 

 duced a technological acceleration rather than a "revolution": that 

 to a large extent it was adapted to and within the continuing frame- 

 work of emerging advances in Neolithic thinking and social organiza- 

 tion, with a population rapidly expanding before iron appeared. In 

 this connection one must emphasize that quite recent explorations in 

 Central New Guinea have shown nearly a million people living with a 

 highly developed culture and irrigated agriculture, above the 3,000- 

 foot mark there, strictly in the stone age. 



By now (1965) it may have become almost painfully clear, to those 

 who have been patient enough to follow my thesis so far, that both the 

 Borneo present and the Borneo past are exceedingly complex; if we 

 are ever to understand them we must use archeology in parallel with 

 folklore — and also, of course, ethnology, anthropology, and linguistics. 

 But I do not for a moment wish to imply that the task is too difficult 

 to be undertaken. On the contrary, it can be very rewarding. For 

 there is, I think, a better chance of getting a full picture for Borneo 

 than perhaps anywhere else in far Asia. Conditions that encouraged 

 active and extending fieldwork since 1947 continue into 1965. There 

 are, of course, grave political difficulties as between Indonesia and 

 Malaysia. But it is an etlmic fact that nearly all the major groups 

 of island population are represented on both sides of the political 

 border and that a large part of the total picture can be built up from 

 one side. Later, under happier conditions, the rest can be filled in 

 from the other. One great thing about archeology is that it can nearly 

 always wait. A pressing urgency about folklore is that in emergent 

 new nations it is liable to be lost unless immediately recorded for 

 future generations. 



Let me now concentrate on the archeological aspect more strictly. 



From 1947 on, the Sarawak Museum began to train local staff in 

 excavating techniques, beginning with simple work at the early iron 

 age sites in the Sarawak River delta already referred to and in some 

 small caves at Bau, close to the Museum in the capital at Kuching. 

 Some of the results of this earlier work have been published in the 

 Journal of the Polynesian Society, and fairly extensively in the Sara- 

 wak Museum Journal. This latter journal, in which we have pro- 



