Reviewed by: A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia ed. by Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz John N. Miksic (bio) Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz, ed. A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2020. 234+ pp. This book describes a search for a fourteenth-century palace in highland West Sumatra. Ancient palaces in Southeast Asia are elusive targets. They were imposing structures, but consisted mostly of wood and were vulnerable to fire, rot, and other forms of decay. At most, we may hope to find their ghosts in the form of soil discolorations (postholes), which are the remains of decayed wooden pillars that once supported such palaces. We are often forced to reconstruct them from written sources, which may be interpreted in different ways, or from artifacts supposedly left behind by palace dwellers. The volume under review describes the excavation of two historic sites and one prehistoric site at the southern edge of the Tanah Datar valley in 2011, 2012, and 2014 by a team of German, French, and Indonesian archaeologists. Those sites are at Bukit Gombak, Bukit Kincir, and Tanah Lua (in the Saruaso area on the north side of the Selo River). I have known Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz (editor and co-author of this report) and Dominik Bonatz (contributor) since 2003. I co-edited a book with them based on a conference held in Berlin in 2004 that assembled a large group of specialists on highland Sumatran anthropology, history, and archaeology.1 Tjoa-Bonatz kindly notes that my hypothesis that Bukit Gombak was the probable site of a fourteenth-century royal capital partially inspired the research described in this book (3).2 Moreover, I visited the site in 2012 when the excavation described in this book was in progress, I received an acknowledgement in the preface to this book (xxiii), and I am frequently acknowledged in the footnotes. Thus, I cannot claim to be an impartial observer. What I can do is comment on the significance of this research from my viewpoint as a specialist in the historical archaeology of Sumatra, and to illustrate the importance of this study of highland Sumatra for Southeast Asian studies. One of the first English descriptions of the Luak nan Tigo, or “Three Valleys” of the Minangkabau, was written by Sir T.S. Raffles in 1818 when he was governor of Bengkulu (Bencoolen), southwest Sumatra. He was aware of the court’s prestige among the Malay [End Page 111] kingdoms of Sumatra and was impressed by the dense population in the Pagarruyung area, which he estimated at a million people.3 In 1275 the east Javanese kingdom of Singasari imposed suzerainty over the Sumatran kingdom of Malayu Dharmaśraya. In the eleventh through twelfth centuries the capital of Malayu was probably in the lower Batanghari, but by the mid-thirteenth century it had moved a hundred miles upstream. The location of the king’s palace in the late-thirteenth century is marked by the base of a statue of a Buddhist deity found at Padang Roco (“Field of Statues”), on which a text was inscribed in 1286 stating that the statue had been brought from Java and erected at Dharmaśraya by Maharaja Kertanagara of Singhasari. Brick sanctuaries showing evidence of several phases of construction together with Chinese ceramics distributed along a seven-kilometer-long stretch of riverbank indicate that the area was inhabited between around 1250 and 1350.4 The precise location of the palace has not yet been established. One of the few people who left a substantial written record in Classical Southeast Asia lived in highland West Sumatra during the fourteenth century: Adityavarman. His biography can be reconstructed from inscriptions in Java and Sumatra, secondary sources, and chronicles.5 He was born in east Java, his mother may have been a Sumatran princess, and he may have gone to China on a diplomatic expedition in 1325. An inscription records that he sponsored work on a temple in east Java in 1343. He may have been deputed to Dharmaśraya as a viceroy of Majapahit in 1347. A Javanese poem written in 1365, Deśavarnana, listed...
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Nov 30, 2023
Naufal Anggito Yudhistira + 2
Open Access
