A rock carving and a newly discovered stone burial chamber at Pasemah, Sumatra

Abstract

This article describes two recent archaeological finds from the district of Pasemah in South Sumatra. Pasemah is an extensive plateau that stretches for about 70 kilometres in a north-west to south-east direction along a wide valley which lies between the Barisan mountains to the west and the smaller Gumai chain to the east. The plateau, which has an average height of between 500 and 1,000 metres, is largely covered with Imperata grass and is dominated by the magnificent volcanic cone of Gunung Dempo (3,150 metres), which rises half-way along the valley. A few steep, narrow ravines lead up from the nearby Bengkulu coastal plain to the west, but the natural entrance to Pasemah is from the east, along the Musi and Lematang rivers, via a steep pass leading up from the town of Lahat. In the early centuries of the Christian era, the area around Pasemah's present-day administrative capital Pagar Alam (710 metres) was home to a highly developed indigenous culture that carved and erected large stone monuments. These monuments include groups and avenues of upright stones, stone blocks with hollowed, cup-like mortars, troughs with human heads and figures carved on them, terraced platforms, three-legged 'dolmen' of uncertain function, stone burial chambers, and many dynamic stone carvings of humans and animals (Bellwood 1985:293). It is these large, animated 'Pasemah figures' in particular that have attracted the curiosity of foreign visitors to Pasemah from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The stone structures of Pasemah and other associated remains were the