1 82 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



Writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts for February 1937, 

 La Valette illustrates ^^^ the uptilted roofs of a branch of the Toradja 

 tribe in Celebes, which he says are deliberately got from the prow and 

 stern of a canoe, and are ' bound up with the tribal traditions of their 

 ancestors, who originally arrived from a country overseas to which the 

 spirits of the dead must return.' The roofs he illustrated are almost 

 identical with forms common in one branch of the Konyak Nagas, east 

 of the frontier of Assam.^^^ 



I have elsewhere suggested a possible migration from Indonesia, and 

 migrations from Indonesia to Ceylon and South India are placed by 

 Hornell ^^® at about the beginning of the Christian era. I cannot help 

 thinking that if, as I am tempted to believe, there was an Indonesian 

 migration which swept upwards northwards into Assam before the Kukis 

 came south, it must have been at an earlier date than that at any rate ; 

 there does seem to have been some expansion in many directions from 

 Indonesia at a date which perhaps precedes the dates suggested by 

 Coedes and Colani and the megalithic civilisation of south-east Asia. 

 It would be interesting to know how far the stratifications of cultures 

 in Oceania will correspond to the apparent succession in Assam of an 

 Oceanic canoe culture, a matrilineal megalithic culture and that of a more 

 recent patrilineal one associated with the Kayan and Kuki. The principal 

 point which I wish to make, however, is that the hill cultures of Assam 

 correspond to other distant cultures or combinations of cultures, all of 

 which appear to be marginal in distribution from an Indonesian centre, 

 and that there is some ground for supposing that migrations of culture, 

 if not of people, have taken place from some centre in or near the Indian 

 archipelago in various directions, one of which terminated in Assam. 



Bibliography. 



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II, Madagascar Revisited (1867). 



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Bengal, No. 1 (1878). 

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■ II, Head-Hunters, Black, White and Brown (1901). 



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"' P. 280. 



"''* Hutton, X, pi. ii, fig. 5, and pi. xiv, fig. 2. 



22» Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 7, 1920. 



