H.— ANTHROPOLOGY 177 



arrival of the Kayans in Borneo to the earliest years of the fourteenth 

 century a.d., a date which fits well enough with Kuki and Tippera 

 tradition. 



Apart from such preceding migrations, of which there may have been 

 many originating in movements in the Chindwin Valley caused by this 

 southward Kuki Kachin migration, and of which we probably have a 

 memory in the traditions of the Angami Lhota and Ao movements from 

 Manipur westwards,2°® the two previous cultures in the Assam hills 

 seem to have been definitely matrilineal and to have belonged to two 

 types. One of these — and presumably the later — seems to have been 

 analogous to the present Khasi and Synteng cultures, the other to that of 

 the Garo and of the Kachari of the Assam plains. The Khasi migration 

 clearly came from the east, and the parallel culture in Tonkin to their earliest 

 remains in Assam is dated by Coedes to about the beginning of our era. 

 The Garo-Kachari peoples seem to have migrated from the north bank 

 of the Brahmaputra, and while the Kachari is now predominantly patri- 

 lineal, as the Garo is matrilineal, both may still be said to be in the process 

 of change as the result of contact between two systems. 



It is interesting to notice that in Madagascar the Vazimba, who pre- 

 ceded the Hova as immigrants, had a number of features in common with 

 the megalith-using Khasi, not all of which were subsequently adopted 

 by the Hova. The latter, for instance, built in wood, whereas the 

 Vazimba used stone. One may also observe that Hocart, writing on the 

 early Fijians,^"' is inclined to think that the more civilised community 

 was swamped by barbarians before the more recent migration of Poly- 

 nesians from the east. Undoubtedly the Naga tribes at present repre- 

 sented by the Konyak Nagas in the north and to a lesser degree by Kachha 

 Nagas to the south of the Naga hills, are associated with a more civilised 

 culture in some respects than that of the intervening tribes who have 

 come up from Manipur, always excepting the Angamis, who are in many 

 respects sut generis and who probably have incorporated a very great 

 deal of the civilisation which preceded them on their present sites. 

 Indeed they speak of the time when their women wore four-inch petti- 

 coats like those of the Konyak tribes, and when they used to expose their 

 dead on platforms — except in the villages of the Dzunokeheno group. 

 It is just that group in which the Fijian Veitingga game is so popular, and 

 in which the house-horns carry birds like those on Malagasy houses. 

 Veitingga, as already mentioned, is also known in the Assam Valley by 

 the name of s'ar khela and used to be played on roads or in village streets, 

 though now almost entirely obsolete. It is still the Dzunokeheno (i.e. 

 water-born villages) in which the conch shell ornament so suggestive of 

 the sea is most popular. They do not, however, claim the sea, but a 

 local stream, as the water of their ancestry, and they are the only Naga 

 tribe that I know of, except the isolated village of Laruri on the Burma 

 frontier, which repudiates any tradition of migration from elsewhere. 

 The Angami are now, like the Kachha Naga, completely democratic in 

 their institutions, but the Konyak tribes in the north still retain tabooed 



««• Hutton, I, 6 sqq. "J J.R.A.I., 49. 



