A tale of two kingdoms : the historical archaeology of Gowa and Tallok, South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

The present thesis details the historical archaeology, or more accurately the archaeological history, of the Makassar kingdoms of Gowa and Tallok, South Sulawesi. Close study of the archaeological record provided strong support for the literal truth of the origin stories of these kingdoms as stated in their chronicles. Gowa appears to have originated as a near-coastal, agrarian kingdom in the 13th-14th centuries. A succession dispute in Gowa, possibly as a reflection of crowding in Gowa's heartland, apparently led to the establishment of Tallok on a major inlet at c.1500. Gowa's subsequent expansion during the 16th century depended on securing the small port-polity of Garassik which later became the major entrepöt in eastern Indonesia, Makassar. Gowa's southward expansion was at the expense of Polombangkeng (the area's largest polity before Gowa's rise). Much of this densely populated land remained under theoretically autonomous rule throughout. The two kingdoms absorbed by Gowa - Tallok and Maros - re-emerged alongside Gowa as powerful kin-based factions in the 17th century confederated state here called "greater Gowa". Makassar in its heyday harboured up to 100,000 people, while two to three times that number would have inhabited the adjacent coastal plain. The organisation of the Makassar aristocracy into hierarchically ordered "status lineages" underpinned the state's administration of its territories and functional bodies. These circumstances allowed greater Gowa to protect traders who defied the Dutch attempt to monopolise the Moluccan spice trade, and concurrently to consolidate suzerainty throughout the South Sulawesi lowlands. In 1667 the Dutch naval forces combined with greater Gowa's Bugis enemies in their successful occupation of Makassar. Bone, the largest Bugis kingdom, emerged as the apex in the re-ordered local political hierarchy, while the Dutch superintended Makassar's international trade. In view of Gowa's original status as an agrarian kingdom, and population densities on the Gowa plain which may have reached towards 1000 people per km2, previous interpretations of Makassar (Gowa) as a port-polity require modification. Rather, greater Gowa was the most spectacular example of a recurrent theme in Bugis-Makassar early history - expansion by an agrarian power to capture a critical enterpöt. The pattern can be traced back to c.1300 when the Bugis kingdom of West Soppeng ruled the port of Suppak some 50 km away. South Sulawesi's only major kingdom not based on extensive wet rice lands, Luwuk, apparently relied on its inaccessabi1ity, and direct support from Javanese traders aligned with Majapahit, for its brief period of prominence during the 15th century. Moreover, the initial steps towards the development of complex South Sulawesi societies appear to have occurred in the Bugis agrarian heartland, far away from the places cited in contemporary foreign accounts or the peninsula's most spectacular archaeological finds. Hence the perspective from South Sulawesi challenges the reliability of these sources in reconstructing the development of early states in the western archipelago. The current emphasis on long-distance trade and traders' influences needs to be understood in the context of coeval settlement patterns, whose detection should be treated as a top priority of archaeological work in the western archipelago. "Indianisation" as a concept of social change should be reinterpreted as a case of Austronesian transformation.