Title:	The Archaeology of the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia
Authors:	S. O’Connor P. Veth M. Spriggs
Keywords:	Eastern Indonesia
Issue Date:	2006
Publisher:	ANU E Press
Description:	Terra Australis reports the results of archaeological and related research within the south and east of Asia, though mainly Australia, New Guinea and island Melanesia — lands that remained terra australis incognita to generations of prehistorians. Its subject is the settlement of the diverse environments in this isolated quarter of the globe by peoples who have maintained their discrete and traditional ways of life into the recent recorded or remembered past and at times into the observable present Alfred Russell Wallace arrived at the sand-spit settlement of Dobo in the Aru Islands (Fig. 1.1) on January 8, 1857, having travelled from the Kei Islands by local sailing perahu on a journey which had taken 30 hours. The following day he set off to explore the small island of Wamar, to which that sand-spit was connected, but soon lost the path to the village of Wamma and had to turn back. But not before he ‘had taken about thirty species of butterflies, more than I had ever captured in a day since leaving the prolific banks of the Amazon, and among them were many most rare and beautiful insects, hitherto only known from a few specimens from New Guinea’ (1869:433). Apart from a day trip to nearby Wokam Island, Wallace was held up in his travels by bad weather and pirate raids on coastal shipping. This gave him time to observe daily life in Dobo and the differences in appearance and behaviour of the ‘Malay’ traders and the ‘Papuan’ indigenous population of the group: ‘So far as I have yet seen, the Malay and Papuan appear to be as widely separated as any two human races that exist, being distinguished by physical, mental and moral characteristics, all of the most marked and striking kind’ (1869:439).
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53044
ISBN:	978 1 921313 04 2
Appears in Collections:	Archeology and Heritage Management

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