Page 55 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

Left: Obsidian flakes from Silabe
Cave, Padang Bindu, OKU, South
Sumatra.

Right: The Site of Passo Tondano,
North Sulawesi.

There are number of factors that would have made caves attractive to them as places
to inhabit. Caves give protection from the elements in the open air, from rain, storms, and
the heat of the sun. Where the cave entrance was small, it aided security from intrusions by
wild animals. Caves were used for a range of purposes, as places to produce tools, to build
a fireplace for processing food stuffs, and as a burial site for group members who had died.
The evidence for these functions is in the various kinds of artefacts and biofacts (ecofacts)
unearthed at different inhabited layers inside the cave.
When caves were not available, they lived in the open air and built simple pile houses. This
can be seen in the shell hills (kijokenmoddinger) spread out 130 km along the eastern coast of
North Sumatra and Aceh (between Percut and Lhok Sumawe). The original location was on
the coast but the site is now 15 kilometers inland (Simanjuntak, 1998). Coastal dwellings such
as this was part of the Hoabinhian Culture which developed widely in Southeast Asia around
14,000-3,000 years ago (McKinnon, 1988). The members were of the Australomelanesid
Race, the continued descendants of EMH inhabiting Asia and Australia (Gorman, 1971).
Hoabinhian spread to reach the western part of Burma and the northern part of
South China, possibly as far as Taiwan. In the Hoabinhian Culture, there were two kinds
of exploitation of inhabitation, living in open coastal areas with a subsistence lifestyle
making use of the sea, and cave or niche dwelling with a subsistence lifestyle of hunting
in remote interior areas. This dual lifestyle pattern is found in North Sumatra where there
are coast inhabiting as well as the indication of remote inhabiting from the finding of
some Sumatralith in Kampret Cave, Leuser mountains dozens of years ago. The existence
of Hoabinhian sites in such areas showed that this typical cultural distribution spread to
southern areas, crossing Malaka Bay up to the coast of Sumatra.

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