Raum & Zeit
Indonesien als Forschungsraum
Until recently it has been assumed that seafaring technology during the Pleistocene and Early Holocene was simple and maritime interaction networks in Island Southeast Asia were limited. However, the assessment of maritime capability has become contentious in the last decade and the Wallacean islands have been at the forefront with new evidence challenging existing paradigms. This includes the obsidian network discussed here as well as evidence of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers ability to undertake pelagic fishing, shell fishhooks amongst the earliest in the world, and idiosyncratic shell beads indicating shared notions of practice and style amongst the Pleistocene hunter gatherer societies on different islands.
There appears to have been a global intensification of maritime interaction in the period after lowest sea-level during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) when sea-levels rose episodically, and sometimes rapidly, until around 7000 years ago. Loss of landmass was not equally distributed depending on the bathymetry of the coastal shelf. Western ISEA saw catastrophic inundation of coastlines, whereas the islands in eastern Indonesia did not see such dramatic changes in landmass due to their steep offshore profiles. Indeed, research has shown that in the case of maritime resource use in eastern ISEA, populations showed substantial resilience during this period in that they maintained their maritime subsistence base with little change. Parallel to the rising oceans, ISEA saw a substantial change in vegetation cover. It has been argued that in some regions the open savannah landscape prevailing during the last glacial period was replaced during the early Holocene with rainforest potentially restricting access to inland environments. Changing environments necessitated adaptation by island populations who focused more heavily on coastal resources after this time. Research on obsidian resource use has shown that obsidian exploitation in the Indo-Pacific region began around 40,000 years ago, however, raw material transportation off-island prior to the end of the Pleistocene was limited.
Research in ISEA correlates well with global arguments about the maritime capabilities of complex hunter-gatherers and the emergence of interaction networks at the end of the Pleistocene. The Eastern Mediterranean has featured prominently in discussions about the temporal patterning of island colonisation and the maritime capacities of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. Although the extent of, and even veracity of the evidence for, pre-LGM activity on islands in the Mediterranean is still much debated, the exploitation of island obsidian resources and its distribution to the continental mainland provides firm evidence for maritime activity during the transition from the terminal Pleistocene to the Early Holocene ca.12,000 years ago, slightly later than in ISEA.