The SEAArch podcast goes to Lenggong in Perak, Malaysia to check out the Lenggong Archaeological Museum and to also talk about the Perak Man, the oldest complete prehistoric skeleton found in this area.

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This is the SEAArch podcast about the archaeology of Southeast Asia. This episode is number two, the Lenggong Archaeological Museum and the Perak Man.

Hello everybody and welcome to the SEAArch podcast. I’m Noel podcasting from Singapore. First off, thanks to everyone who left a comment or emailed me feedback about the first episode, I’m still new to all this and hopefully I’ll get better in time to come. This episode is a little different from the last one, I wanted to do a video cast but while I was at the museum I wasn’t allowed to take any photos. So we’ll stick to audio today, but a transcript will be up along with some other pictures. Aside from the museum, I’ll spend a little more time on the Perak Man, which is really the highlight of the whole exhibition.

Lenggong and the Museum

The Lenggong Valley is what you can call the prehistoric capital of Malaysia. It’s got an archaeological record going back to about 300,000 years with sites like Bukit Jawa, Temelong, Lawin and of course Gua Gunung Runtuh where the Perak Man was found. If you go to the website, you will see a map of the Lenggong Valley that I found on Google earth and you can see the vast majority of the place is green – that’s because it’s all oil palm plantations now.

The museum itself is pretty a modern building and is quite out of place in the middle of oil palm trees in the middle of nowhere. I visited the place on a Saturday afternoon and it was during Ramadan so it was very quiet. Entry was free and you just signed your name in the guestbook. Most of the visitors were locals – either from Lenggong itself or from Gerik which was like the town nearby. I like my museums to have a clear narrative about what it’s about, so the Lenggong Archaeological Museum was a pretty good museum. There was a kind of a story running through it as in there was a beginning, a middle and an end. You start by learning about the excavations in Lenggong area, you read about the archaeological record and see the stone tools, and of course the climax of the whole exhibition was the Perak Man, the biggest and most significant find of the area. I think my only peeve about the museum was this diorama right in the middle of the museum which had cavemen at work with men hunting and women languishing in the pool with the children. I think that’s a really misleading perception about early peoples in the sense that you have an artefact and you cannot tell which gender is using the artefact. So all you have in the archaeological record is maybe a stone hammer, and you know what it was used for, but you don’t know anything about who used it or who would tend to use it if there were any tendency. I think a diorama like that just tells you more about current society and what the current gender norms are, rather than what life really was back then. So I thought that was a little disappointing.

The Perak Man So let’s talk more about Perak Man. The Perak Man was found in Gua Gunung Runtuh, which translates as the cave of the collapsed mountain. He was found in 1990 and dug up in 1991. He dates to about 11,000 years before present, and is one of the most complete skeletons for this time period in this region. He was buried with legs tucked towards chest, his right arm touching shoulder and his left arm bent so that his hand would rest on his stomach. Besides that, they found deposits of animal bones at right shoulder, to his left and to his bottom, and deposits of stone tools around the body. They also did not find any other burials in the cave. Forensically speaking, the Perak Man was probably a man – we can’t tell for sure because his pelvis wasn’t well preserved. That’s the surest way you tell whether a skeleton was male or female, but a lot of the other bones exhibited strong male characteristics so he was probably Perak Man rather than Perak Woman. He shared the characteristics of an australomelanasoid, which is the kind of humans you find in Australia, Papua, Indonesia and some parts of Malaysia. He wasn’t very tall, he stood about 154 cm, which is about 5 feet. The bones that were found deposited near him were identified to have come from wild boar, monkey, monitor lizard and something called the rusa, which is a kind of deer, and are thought to be food deposits. As for the stone tools, there were about ten of them scattered around the body, and most of them were pebble tools and some hammer stones.

There were two significant things about the Perak Man skeleton. The first was that he had a malformed left hand, meaning his left arm and left hand were really, really small compared to his right hand and right arm, which is possibly from a genetic disorder known as brachymesophalangia, which means he lived with this all his life. This theory is also supported because his spine is curved towards the right which is what you’d expect to find if you’ve lived with only one good hand. The second interesting thing about the Perak Man was that despite his handicap, he lived to be about 45 which is very old for his time period. And especially when you consider that he might have been a hunter-gatherer, with only one good hand you can’t really hunt or gather very well and so living to 45 with that kind of handicap is pretty exceptional.

What does all this tell us about the Perak Man and the society he lived in? One conclusion that the study made was that he must have been a pretty high-up member in that society because the burial was very elaborate. They dug a pit, and then put him into the pit and then placed the food offerings, and then covered him with small shells, and then place more offerings and tools, and then another shell layer, followed by a final dirt layer. That was pretty labour intensive – when there tends to be a lot of labour and a lot of time invested into a burial, it’s not unreasonable to infer that this person was someone of high importance. Also to support that theory, like I said, he was 45 years old and he was very old for that time with a disability as well. If you were in a hunter-gatherer society and you couldn’t hunt very well, people had to take care of you – and people don’t take care of you unless you were respected or there was some sort of hierarchy in place where he was respected. That’s another reason to support the social hierarchy theory. And of course there was burial with grave goods – there were food offerings and tool offerings and that’s another indicator of social hierarchy. People who get buried with burial deposits often tend to be people of higher status. You just have to think about the pyramids which are basically big tombs, and all the treasures that were entombed in the pyramids to get an idea of social hierarchy.

Of course, it’s a bit premature to say all of this about the Perak Man and his society. We should take this with some caution because we don’t have anything to benchmark with. I remember reading something dated in 1897 about burials found in Perak caves which are quite significant because they report of human remains buried with the legs tucked to the chest, very much like how the Perak Man was buried. But we just don’t have data on those burials and it’s still very hard to compare those with the Perak Man burial.

So that’s it for this podcast on the Lenggong Archaeological Museum and the Perak Man. If you’re in Malaysia and you want to visit the Museum, you’ll have to drive up the North-South Highway and take exit no. 143 at Kuala Kangsar – that’s about 3 hours away from KL – and then take route 76 to the Lenggong Archaeological Museum. The sources that are used for this podcast was the museum itself, and this book called The excavation of Gua Gunung Runtuh and the Discovery of the Perak Man in Malaysia, edited by Zuraina Majid.

Once again, there will be photos and a transcript of this podcast up on the website at http://seaarch.wordpress.com. If you’ve got any comments or questions, you can always email me at seaarch@gmail.com. Until next time, this is Noel, signing off for the SEAArch podcast.

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