The Archaeology ofForaging and Farming at Niah Cave Sarawak…砂拉越尼亚洞觅食和养殖考古学.pdfVIP

The Archaeology of Foraging and Farming at Niah CaveJ Sarawak GRAEME BARKER THE NIAH CAVES ARE A SYSTEM of spectacular caverns on the northern edge of the Gunong Subis limestone massif, on the coastal plain of Sarawak in northern Borneo (Fig. 1). The caves are renowned for their large populations of bats and swiftlets. The guano produced by them has traditionally been sold for fertilizer, and for centuries the nests of one of the species of swiftlets have been collected by local Punan foragers to be sold to the Chinese at premium prices for birds nest soup (Beavitt 1992). The caves are also famous for the major campaigns of excavations conducted in several of the entrances, especially in the West Mouth of the Great Cave of Niah (Fig. 2), by Tom and Barbara Harrisson in the 1950s and 1960s. Their remarkable discoveries in the West Mouth included (in 1958) a human skull, the so-called Deep Skull (Brothwell 1960), in deposits that yielded a 14C date on charcoal of ca. 40,000 B.P.,l making it the earliest modern human in Southeast Asia. In the same part of the cave they found evidence for habitation and occasional burials dating to the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, and farther into the interior a large number of burials of broadly Neolithic date and character, yielding 14C dates from ca. 6000 B.P. to ca. 1000 B.P. (B. Harrisson 1967; T. Harrisson 1958, 1965, 1970). They conducted smaller excavations in several other entrances of the cave complex, finding evidence for very small-scale Pleistocene occupation in Gan Kira, what was probably a late