famous rock at Santubong of unknown antiquity, and painted on the walls of the Kain Hitam mortuary cave at Niah.
Large Cultural Complexes
where artistic enterprise is concentrated.
Funerary art is concentrated on the large and decorative grave houses of the nobility, called salong, in which encoffined corpses were placed permanently high above the ground. There is no tradition of narrative art associated with funerals. The salong were located apart from the villages, usually on high ground overlooking the river, and as such form very distinctive territorial
markers for the benefit of river travellers. Some groups, particularly in Sarawak, practised secondary redeposition of bones and erected their own distinctive forms of bone depository in the form of carved poles called klerieng. [PLATE 50A, 54]
Anthropomorphic figure sculpture was not associated especially with funerals nor with the commemoration of individuals. Terrifying figures with enlarged genitalia, sometimes brandishing weapons, were erected on paths outside villages and outside communal buildings to frighten away evil influences or formed part of public structures associated with community ritual. The figure carving tended to be more roughly made and less diverse in composition than that of the southeast and very little has found its way into museum collections.
[PLATE 55]
The central area was one of continual inter-group competition, with consequent territorial dispute and warfare. The accoutrements of war form a notable part of the identifying accessories of males in this region, with the
central Borneo war kit gradually becoming a kind of identifying badge for Dayak men from many regions and ethnic origins. The parang ilang was a weapon of unique design. It has an unusual blade which is asymmetrical in cross-section, one side being slightly concave and the other convex with a single sharp edge. It is a chopping weapon, and thus frequently categorised as a headhunting sword although they were used for a huge variety of mundane tasks in the jungle and the fields. Good specimens were prestige items and could be used as gifts or for the payment of fines. [PLATE 56A]
Spears tended to be plain and functional items with leaf shaped iron blades. The spear point frequently formed part of a blowpipe, but these were more hunting weapons than weapons of warfare among most groups. The bamboo quivers for the poisoned arrows were often more elaborate items however, having carved wooden handles, sometimes also wooden lids and occasionally decorated with engraved designs. [PLATE 56C]
The shields of central Borneo were large hexagonal wooden pieces angled to the mid-line. Museum collections abound with specimens with painted
designs, and some set with rows of tufts of human hair. These were the
exceptional display pieces and the more usual type was a robust version simply painted red. The most common motif for the front of a painted shield was a monstrous face, sometimes attached to an attenuated body in squatting position. Additional decoration included anthropomorphic figures, aso or hornbill heads, all set in a complex interlacing design. [PLATE 50B, 52B, 53A, 56B, 57]
The standard war attire of central Borneo consisted of a skin cape, often set in front with a large pearl shell, and a robust plaited rattan cap covered in skin, tufts of hair, or set with beadwork panels and adorned with hornbill or argus pheasant feathers. When accompanied by a painted shield and a parang ilang brandished in menacing pose, a man was turned into the prototype of a central Borneo warrior. [PLATE 15B, 57]
In personal presentation the peoples of central Borneo had a number of features in common which differentiated them from people living closer to the coast. Perhaps the most readily noted was mutilation and distention of the earlobes. In the case of women the ears were often made to hang in loops to below the shoulders. The lobes of the men were less dramatically distended, but they also cut a large hole in the upper shell of the ear to insert ornaments made from animal teeth. [PLATE 58,59,60] Like many other Dayak peoples, they formerly filed and blackened their teeth. This was later replaced with a fashion for inserting metal plates over the front teeth. A form of body mutilation
practised extensively by the central Borneo men was perforation of the penis, an operation performed at puberty to allow the insertion of a metal bar or palang}
Both men and women tattooed their bodies. The tattoo designs were very different for men and women, but the overall system of design for each was similar all over the region. Women were very heavily tattooed in a network of fine and dense intricate patterns over their arms from the elbows to the fingertips and over their legs from their thighs to the toes. [PLATE 61] The men, on the other hand, were much more sparing in their tattoos, employing isolated motifs such as rosettes or aso designs on strategic points such as the shoulder, the chest or the thighs. [PLATE 62]
1. This custom was first reported by Mr Dalton (1831:53) for the Dayaks of Kutai, along with