Pottery production and trade in the Banda zone, Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article provides the first comprehensive description of pottery production in the Kei islands of eastern Indonesia, based on field data collected mainly in 1981 and on museum collections in the UK and the Netherlands. The account is situated in what we know of the dynamics of trading systems that existed in the Moluccan islands between 1500 and 2000. Kei pottery is widely thought to be the successor of a tradition established in the Banda islands that was extinguished with the 1621 Dutch massacre, but re-established at several sites in the Kei islands by Banda migrants after this date. These claims are critically examined using ethnographic and archaeological data, and an attempt made to compare the production and trading patterns of pottery in the ‘Banda zone’ before and after 1621.

KEYWORDS:

• Banda islands
• history and prehistory
• Kei islands
• pottery production
• trading zones

Acknowledgements

Fieldwork in 1981 by Roy Ellen and Nicola Goward was conducted under the auspices of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences, and export of specimens approved by the Provincial Department of Education and Culture in Ambon and the Directorate of History and Archaeology in Jakarta. The research was funded by the British Academy and the Sir Ernest Cassell Foundation. Thanks to Pim Westerkamp (Leiden), Neil Hopkins (University of Kent), and Hans Hägerdal (Växjö). The Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen granted permission to reproduce Figure 2. Copyright of photographs is otherwise held by the author. This article is dedicated to the memory of Keith Nicklin, who first fired my interest in pottery.

Note on contributor

Roy Ellen is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Human Ecology in the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent. His current research interests include cultural cognition, ethnobiological knowledge systems, and the resilience of traditional modes of exchange and social reproduction in the Moluccas. Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Roy Ellen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7349-2419

Notes

1 All field photographs were taken in March 1981, in either Elat or Wakol. Registration codes prefixed by ‘As’ indicate a specimen now in the British Museum, RMV Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde and TM Museum voor den Tropen. MM indicates terms in Moluccan dialects of Malay.

2 Crawford (pers. comm. 1971) has suggested the possibility of Kei pottery accompanying trepangers to the Kimberley area of Western Australia (see e.g. Morwood and Hobbs 1997). At Tamarinda Crawford reports two types of pottery: that made from clay derived from the Antedesitic zone, and some made from fine clay tempered with small pieces of calcium carbonate, mainly broken shell and small fragments of coral, very similar to the Kei ware in matrix, though none with any surface decoration remaining. According to Crawford, Aru ware is similar to the Kei material, but the matrix includes small pieces of rounded quartz and some black minerals to be identified. We now know much more about Aru pottery (O’ Connor et al. 2007; Spriggs et al. 1998; Veth et al. 1998).

3 For an account of sago oven-brick manufacture in Kilgah during 1986, and for a survey of the ethnography and archaeology of sago oven bricks in the central Moluccas, see Ellen and Latinis (2012).