No abstract

In each year, a considerable amount of time was spent liaising with kepala desa (village leaders, Bahasa Indonesian) and communities, towards a thorough explanation of our objectives and in order to identify any known sites. After travelling to the various islands from the kecamatan (district capital), Dobo, the general strategy was to carry out formal discussions and interviews, address adat (customary law) issues, and then carry out surveys and site inspections with community representatives. Initial reconnaissance surveys in 1995 were focussed on the northwest islands as these lay closest to the edge of the Continental Shelf. As discussed in Chapter 1, we had hoped they might provide stratified sites with old and continuous occupation sequences, perhaps going back to the earliest period of human occupation of Aru. These islands comprised Kobroor, Wamar, Wokam, Ujir and Wasir (Fig. 4.1). Most of the geological formations surveyed on these islands were found to be unsuitable for cave or rockshelter formation. Where caves were found, they were either posttransgression sea caves of recent origin in soft sedimentary rock or contained running water and thus were unsuitable for human occupation. Our initial strategy to target cave sites on the northwestern islands closest to the edge of the Continental Shelf, in the hope of finding evidence of Pleistocene occupation, thus proved unsuccessful. Suitable caves in this part of Aru appear to be restricted to the karst formations, which mainly occur in the interior of the larger islands and are away from early shorelines. In 1995 only one cave with clear excavation potential was located. This was Liang Lemdubu (Site 9), the focus terra australis 22

Perdagangan merupakan suatu sistem yang tersusun dari berbagai komponen terkait satu dengan lainnya. Sistem ini sangat fleksibel cakupannya, baik cakupan waktu maupun cakupan wilayah. Satu sama lain dapat dilihat secara masing- masing komponen tetapi akan lebih jelas kalua dilihat secara global. Kespesifikan ini yang menjadikan sistem perdagangan mempunyai kesamaan dan perbedaan antara satu cakupan wilayah dengan lainnya, dengan waktu yang bervariasi. Hal ini karena dipengaruhi oleh berbagai faktor baik dari luar maupun dari dalam sistem itu sendiri. Perbedaan-kesamaan yang ada muncul antara lain karena adanya kegiatan politis-ekonomis- religius (Politic-economics and religious) yang akhirnya mempengaruhi perubahan manusia pendukungnya. Suatu rangkuman data secara arkeologi-kesejarahan akan digunakan dalam menganalisa kegiatan perdagangan di Indonesia dari dulu hingga kini.