7 - Looms, Weaving and the Austronesian Expansion

Summary

Introduction

In the last few decades, comparative approaches that map languages and archaeological features over a broad area have contributed significantly to understanding the prehistory of Southeast Asia. In contrast, despite plenty of interest in the material culture of the region, this aspect has been relatively little studied in a comparative or regional sense (but see Blench, this volume). Pioneering work was done in the first half of the twentieth century by ethnologists such as Jasper and Pirngadie (1912) and Buhler (1943), who documented the art and material culture of the Indonesian archipelago, and by Pelras (1972) who surveyed Indonesian loom technology and terminology, but this type of work largely halted in the latter part of the twentieth century, when the emphasis shifted to examining individual cultures in depth. There are exceptions to this, such as surveys by Maxwell (1990), Yoshimoto (1987, 2013) and Howard and Howard (2002) and Howard (2010) who explored common themes in weaving-related traditions across the region. Recently, there have been signs that the “comparative project” in material culture in a broad sense is tentatively resuming (see for example the recent exhibition catalogue of Austronesian artifacts edited by Benitez- Johannot [2011]), spurred on by successes in linguistics and archaeology and by the new questions and challenges this work poses.

In this chapter I will review the distributions in Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) and Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) of two weaving technologies with ancient roots: the body-tensioned loom and the ikat technique for making decorated textiles. I will attempt to interpret the present-day distributions of these technologies, and the archaeological record (as it relates to yarn production and weaving), in terms of prehistoric dispersals. These prehistoric events have been modulated by processes occurring in the historical past that have altered (but not completely obscured) the underlying patterns. In particular I will compare the looms of the mainland with those of the Austronesian-speaking peoples of ISEA, and discuss the consequences for our understanding of how the Austronesian expansion occurred. I will show that it is difficult to explain the present-day distribution of looms and ikat weaving based on the “out of Taiwan” model that has gained currency in the last two decades. Instead, these characteristically “Austronesian” technologies appear to have originated directly from the Asian mainland.