Lithic and other non-ceramic artefacts

Abstract

During the course of the North Moluccan project, non-ceramic artefacts were recovered in only small numbers, with rather limited raw material or stylistic variation. Flaked stone tools were especially rare in comparison with many other pre-Neolithic locations in Southeast Asia. The site of Siti Nafisah produced no flaked stone at all, despite being fairly rich to its cultural base in animal bones, bone points, and shells (Table 4.1). Our general impression during the course of the research was that good cryptocrystalline raw materials such as chert, jasper, and agate are very rare in these islands (and only one piece of obsidian was found), such that people would have had to turn to inferior volcanic and metamorphic rocks for making stone tools. Perhaps they turned to alternative materials such as shell (Szabó et al. 2007; Szabó and Koppel 2015), although we did not find many finished shell tools in pre-Neolithic contexts, except for the shell adzes from Gebe. A series of bone points from Golo, Siti Nafisah, and Uattamdi have already been analysed and published by Juliette Pasveer (Pasveer and Bellwood 2004). As with the Golo lithics (below), detailed descriptions are not repeated here, except for the shell artefacts discussed by Katherine Szabó in the next chapter.