The colonial ethnological line: Timor and the racial geography of the Malay Archipelago

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Roque
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
Racial Science ◽  
Physical Anthropologist

This article examines the connected histories of racial science and colonial geography in Island Southeast Asia. By focusing on the island of Timor, it explores colonial boundaries as modes of arranging racial classifications, and racial typologies as forms of articulating political geography. Portuguese physical anthropologist António Mendes Correia's work on the ethnology of East Timor is examined as expressive of these productive connections. Correia's classificatory work ingeniously blended political geography and racial taxonomy. Between 1916 and 1945, mainly based on data from the Portuguese enclave of Oecussi and Ambeno, he claimed a distinct Malayan racial type for the whole colony of ‘Portuguese Timor’. Over the years he developed an anthropogeographical theory that simultaneously aimed to reclassify East Timor and to revise the racial cartography of the Malay Archipelago, including Wallace's famous ethnological line.

New evidence from East Timor contributes to our understanding of earliest modern human colonisation east of the Sunda Shelf

Antiquity ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 81 (313) ◽  
pp. 523-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Sunda Shelf ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
New Research ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Southern Route

New dates by which modern humans reached East Timor prompts this very useful update of the colonisation of Island Southeast Asia. The author addresses all the difficult questions: why are the dates for modern humans in Australia earlier than they are in Island Southeast Asia? Which route did they use to get there? If they used the southern route, why or how did they manage to bypass Flores, whereHomo floresiensis, the famous non-sapienshominin known to the world as the ‘hobbit’ was already in residence? New work at the rock shelter of Jerimalai suggests some answers and new research directions.

Trade, Ethnicity, and Identity in Island Southeast Asia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Y. Andaya
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Southwest Monsoon ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
Trade Route ◽  
Monsoon Winds ◽  
East West

Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) consists of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, East Timor, and the Philippines and was the midway point in the vibrant East–West international maritime trade route that stretched from Europe, Middle East, East Africa, and South Asia to its west; and China, Ryukyu, Japan, and Korea to its east. The favored stop was along the Straits of Melaka, a calm haven protected from the force of the northeast and southwest monsoon winds. The stream of traders in the Straits enabled local ports to develop into international port cities, whose inhabitants created mixed communities and cultures: commodities were re-fashioned or re-packaged into hybrid forms to accommodate the distinctive tastes of different groups, while frequent and lengthy sojourns by traders resulted in liaisons that produced mixed offspring and cultures. Enhanced economic opportunities encouraged mobility and establishment of diaspora communities in the littoral. More sinister were the forced mobility through wars and slavery that produced reconstituted ethnic communities and new ethnicities and identities in the early modern period (c. 1400– c. 1830s).

scholarly journals Early Modern Human Lithic Technology from Jerimalai, East Timor

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Marwick
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Lithic Technology ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Human Occupation ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
Strong Resemblance ◽  
Pelagic Fishing

Jerimalai is a rock shelter in East Timor with cultural remains dated to 42,000 years ago, making it one of the oldest known sites of modern human activity in island Southeast Asia. It has special global significance for its record of early pelagic fishing and ancient shell fish hooks. It is also of regional significance for its early occupation and comparatively large assemblage of Pleistocene stone artefacts. Three major findings arise from our study of the stone artefacts. First, there is little change in lithic technology over the 42,000 year sequence, with the most noticeable change being the addition of new artefact types and raw materials in the mid-Holocene. Second, the assemblage is dominated by small chert cores and implements rather than pebble toolsand choppers, a pattern we argue is common in island SE Asian sites as opposed to mainland SE Asian sites. Third, the Jerimalai assemblage bears a striking resemblance to the assemblage from Liang Bua, argued by the Liang Bua excavation team to be associated with Homo floresiensis. We argue that the near proximity of these two islands along the Indonesian Island chain (c.100km apart), the long antiquity of modern human occupation in the region (as documented at Jerimalai), and the strong resemblance of distinctive flake stone technologies seen at both sites, raises the intriguing possibility that both the Liang Bua and Jerimalai assemblages were created by modern humans.

Fataluku

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-425
Author(s):  
Tyler M. Heston ◽  
Stephanie Locke
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
East Timor ◽  
The West ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
West Timor ◽  
Eastern Half

Fataluku ([fataluku], ISO 639-3: ddg) is a language spoken by approximately 37,000 people on the eastern end of Timor-Leste (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2016). Timor-Leste, also known as East Timor, is an independent nation that occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor in island Southeast Asia, which it shares politically with Indonesia in the west. Timor is located north of Australia, between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Bali in the west and New Guinea in the east.

Cave Archaeology and Sampling Issues in the Tropics: A Case Study from Lene Hara Cave, a 42,000 Year Old Occupation Site in East Timor, Island Southeast Asia

2010 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue O’Connor ◽  
Anthony Barham ◽  
Matthew Spriggs ◽  
Peter Veth ◽  
Ken Aplin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Island Southeast Asia ◽  
Cave Archaeology ◽  
The Tropics

The dating of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic: an attempt at chronometric hygiene and linguistic correlation

Antiquity ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (240) ◽  
pp. 587-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Spriggs
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Agricultural Crops ◽  
Agricultural Economy ◽  
Island Southeast Asia

As with conventional definitions of the Neolithic anywhere, the concept in this region relies on there being an agricultural economy, the traces of which are largely indirect. These traces are artefacts interpreted as being linked to agriculture, rather than direct finds of agricultural crops, which are rare in Island Southeast Asia. This definition by artefacts is inevitably polythetic, particularly because many of the sites which have been investigated are hardly comparable. We can expect quite different assemblages from open village sites as opposed to special use sites such as burial caves, or frequentation caves that are used occasionally either by agriculturalists while hunting or by gatherer-hunter groups in some form of interaction with near-by agricultural populations. And rarely is a full range of these different classes of sites available in any one area.

The Mestizos of Kisar: An insular racial laboratory in the Malay Archipelago

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463
Author(s):  
Hans Pols ◽  
Warwick Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
East Timor ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Malay Archipelago ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Dutch East Indies ◽  
Race Mixing

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Mestizos of Kisar, a dry, almost barren island in the Dutch East Indies off the coast of East Timor, were a model for the study of race mixing or human hybridity. Discovered in the late nineteenth century, these ‘anomalous blondes’ of Dutch and Kisarese ancestry became subjects of intense scrutiny by physical anthropologists. As a German specialist in tropical medicine in search of a convenient empire after 1918, Ernst Rodenwaldt favourably evaluated the physique and mentality of the isolated, fair Mestizos in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Back in Germany in the 1930s, as professor of hygiene at Heidelberg, his views on race hardened to accord with Nazi doctrine. Yet after the war, Rodenwaldt successfully cited his earlier appreciation of mixed-race peoples in the eastern Malay Archipelago as grounds for rehabilitation. Once a celebrated case study in human hybridity, the Mestizos of Kisar were erased from anthropological discussion in the 1950s, when race mixing ceased to be a biological issue and became instead a sociological interest. Still, Rodenwaldt's work continues to exert some limited influence in the eastern parts of the archipelago and among the Kisarese diaspora, indicating the penetrance and resilience of colonial racialisation projects.

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