A Matter of Balance: An overview of Pleistocene occupation history and the impact of the Last Glacial Phase in East Timor and the Aru Islands, eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This paper explores the subsistence records from cave sites with Pleistocene‐aged deposits in East Timor and the Aru Islands during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and discusses these records within the context of the limited archaeological evidence for LGM occupation from elsewhere in the Indonesian Archipelago. Although Timor and the Aru Islands are at similar latitudes, the onset of aridity had markedly different impacts on the settlement and subsistence choices available to hunter‐gatherers in these two regions. We suggest that the different occupation trajectories seen in Timor and Aru during the LGM are related, at least in part, to biogeographic contrasts across the Indonesian Archipelago.

Quaternary Murid Rodents of Timor Part I: New Material of Coryphomys buehleri Schaub, 1937, and Description of a Second Species of the Genus

“…Excavations in five cave sites, one of them studied previously by the Portuguese archaeologist Antonio de Almeida, again produced abundant vertebrate remains from contexts ranging from near contemporary back to more than 38,000 BP (O'Connor et al, 2002;O'Connor and Aplin, 2007;Veth et al, 2005). Our studies of the combined Glover and newly excavated collections inspired a new interpretation of taxic diversity within this fascinating prehistoric fauna.…”

The dynamics of culture and nature in a ‘protected’ Fataluku landscape

“…People rely on the forests for cuscus (a species of possum), monkeys and feral animals, such as deer and wild pigs, to supplement their protein supplies, and these 'wild' resources are particularly important in times of seasonal and politically triggered food shortages (Pannell and O'Connor 2010). Apart from some species of birds (Trainor et al 2003), bats and small murids, none of the animals that inhabit the forests are endemic to the island of Timor; they are all human introductions brought from areas to the east or west during late prehistoric or historic times (O'Connor and Aplin 2007). Many other kinds of resources, aside from wild game, are acquired from within the Park including plant foods such as nuts, fruits and tubers, medicinal species (Collins et al 2007), bamboo, canoe trees, and wood and fibrous plant materials used for building and for making the diversity of items of material culture used by households every day.…”

Human Palaeoecological Interactions and Owl Roosting at Tron Bon Lei, Alor Island, Eastern Indonesia

“…Archaeofaunal sequences from caves and rockshelters have been used as proxies for palaeoecological conditions during hominin settlement of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) (e.g., Barton et al 2013;Morwood et al 2008;O'Connor and Aplin 2007;Piper and Due 2006;Stimpson 2012Stimpson , 2013van den Bergh et al 2009). Such environmental reconstructions also provide data pertinent to hominin occupation sequences in relation to site formation processes and subsistence.…”

“…900 kya (Brumm et al 2010), has never been connected to a continental land mass. Many of the islands are relatively poor in terrestrial native fauna because water crossings act as barriers, limiting movements of terrestrial taxa (MacArthur and Wilson 1967;O'Connor and Aplin 2007).…”

“…Declines in terrestrial faunal diversity are reported from Wallacea from before the time Homo sapiens first arrived in the region (e.g., Louys et al 2016;van den Bergh et al 2009), such that by the time of their arrival the only terrestrial resources available to first H. sapiens appears to have been rodents, medium to small reptiles, birds, and amphibians. Thus, with the exception of a few inland sites on Timor (Aplin and Helgen 2010;Glover 1986;O'Connor and Aplin 2007) and Sulawesi (Simons and Bulbeck 2004), subsistence behaviors of early modern humans in Wallacea appear to have focused on marine resources, even in the earliest occupation levels sampled (O'Connor et al 2011;Samper Carro et al 2016;Sazbó and Amesbury 2010).…”