Archaeologists discover evidence of prehistoric island settlers
Tavu is one of countless tropical islands strung across the eastern Indonesian archipelago, and until early 2020 no archaeologist had ever set foot on it. That changed when Dr Mira Lindqvist and a team from the University of Otago carried out the island's first excavations. Their finds point to a prehistoric people equally at home on land and sea — hunting in the thick rainforest, gathering food along the shore, and quite possibly sailing from one island to the next.
Behind the dig lay a larger question: how did the earliest humans travel out of mainland Asia, across the islands of Indonesia, and on into the now-vanished landmass that once joined Australia to New Guinea? Lindqvist's group had argued in earlier work that the northern route through the Wallacean islands — Tavu among them — would have been the easiest to travel, and that such islands very likely served as 'stepping stones' for the crossings made here thousands of years ago. What the theory lacked was firm evidence that anyone had actually lived in so remote a spot in deep antiquity, and it was the search for such early settlement sites that drew the team to Tavu.
A little inland from Denu, a village on Tavu's northern shore, the team came upon two limestone cliffs whose faces held prehistoric rock shelters worth digging. With permission and help from Denu's inhabitants, a small test pit was opened in each shelter. The digging yielded a wealth of artefacts, among them broken axe pieces, the oldest about 14,000 years old. Denu's earliest axes had been fashioned from shell, taken from clams. Such shell axes were nothing new to the region — comparable ones of much the same age had already turned up elsewhere, notably on Rua, an island just to the northeast. As on Rua, these Tavu axes were most probably used to build canoes, letting the early communities keep in touch with neighbours across the water.
The deepest cultural deposits at Denu pushed the record of human presence on Tavu back furthest — to roughly 18,000 years ago. The world was colder and drier then, so the rainforest that now feels almost impassable would have been far more open. With the sea about 120 metres below its present level, Tavu was much bigger too, taking in not only several small islets nearby but also Sela, which rising waters have since cut off as a separate island.
As the last ice age ended, about 11,700 years ago, temperatures and rainfall both climbed, and Tavu's jungle must have thickened as a result. The team sees no accident in the fact that the first flint axes — replacing the older shell ones — appear at just this point; the tougher tool was presumably a response to the harder work of clearing an ever-denser forest. Grinding flint into an axe head takes about twice as long as shell, yet flint keeps a sharp edge far longer.
The animal teeth recovered from the shelters point to the Tavu cuscus — a possum-like marsupial still found on the island — as the creature most often hunted by those living there. As the forest closed in, axes were probably used to open clearings where game could be caught more easily.
Among the Denu finds was obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock; since Tavu has no source of its own, it must have reached the island from elsewhere. Certain kinds of pendants appeared as well, of a type already known from islands further south in Wallacea. Once more the message is plain: Tavu's people regularly made journeys to other islands.
For some 10,000 years, the evidence suggests, the two Denu shelters housed a settled population — and then, about 8,000 years ago, both fell empty. Whether their occupants left Tavu entirely or resettled elsewhere on it is impossible to say. Perhaps the undergrowth had thickened until axes could no longer keep it in check; perhaps people simply moved to the coast and took up fishing instead of hunting.
Whatever drove them out, nothing suggests the Denu shelters were used again for a very long time — not until about 1,000 years ago, when fresh occupants arrived with ceramics and with objects worked in gold and silver. Given Tavu's position, this final chapter of settlement probably also tied the shelters to the far-reaching trade in sandalwood, a commodity grown across the region and carried to markets throughout the wider world.
