Recently, needing a break from our dreadful, insane politics and the pandemic,
I turned to completing a project begun months ago, the organizing for storage of countless photographs scattered across my desk, of photos taken in 1980 as I crossed Indonesia, visiting over forty villages on a consultancy for the Ministry of Health. Several years ago I included a number of the photos in various blog posts but this time, reviewing and reminiscing, one in particular, different from the others, caught my attention. 
It is, I think, from Sumatra, but what it has me remembering is that when I and my assistant/interpreter entered the village we were received, not by the village headman and village health team, but by this traditionally dressed man who immediately walked over to a gong and struck it. We waited and some minutes later people began arriving, we introduced ourselves to one another, the headman and health team members settled in and my interviewing began. I was so charmed by the gong that after the meeting I asked 
its keeper to pose with it for the photo. The one other photograph with a gong is, as the sign on the office building indicates, in a South East Sulawesi village where I am standing with the PUSKEMAS/ Community Health Center team and their mobile clinic van.
I looked on-line for “Indonesian gong” and learned only that the word gong came to us from Java and refers to a flat, circular metal disc that is struck with a mallet. Gong is defined as a percussion musical instrument used in Asia and Southeast Asia.
In further searches, the term “slit drum” was attached to pictures of the sort of instrument I saw in Indonesia but from the Republic of Vanauto, a Melanesian island nation east of Australia, which puzzled me. Melanesians are different from Indonesians. The Pacific island people related to Indonesians are the Polynesians.
I set that anomaly aside, searched for “slit drum” elsewhere and discovered a long tradition of the drums as a means of communication throughout Indonesia. Here for photos and background information from a Jakarta newspaper article on Java’s slit drum, the kenthongan, now made in bamboo rather than wood.
The article reads “Those who grew up in the 1980s are perhaps the last generation familiar with the sound of kentongan beaten at night … a slit drum used in traditional villages to communicate, (to) produce rhythmic beats as a sign that some residents were on duty patrolling the village. … At a time when telephones were rare, sound codes from the beating of kentongan were vital for communicating. … …. beginning from the era of the kingdoms of the archipelago, (the kentongan) spread to almost all regions in Indonesia. Each region has its own code and meanings for kentongan sound patterns. ….. a sign for residents to gather, an invitation to participate in cleaning up or building something in the village and as a sign that prayers will start soon. …”
In Madura, a small island off Java, the slit-drum is called gul-gul. In Bali, it’s the kulkul.
“…beginning from the era of the kingdoms of the archipelago …” I wonder. Could it have been that the slit drum was part of an earlier Indonesian culture, one of village folk long before the time of kings and kingdoms. While learning something of Balinese history, I learned, as well, a bit of Island South East Asian history and prehistory. I read that the earliest people in the islands were, of course, Paleolithic Age hunter-gatherers, living off the land, moving frequently in small bands from one camp site to another, making and using flaked stone tools. (See here for using simple stone flakes as tools.) In Australia, people lived in such societies into modern times, but mostly the hunter-gatherers were replaced or absorbed by later migrants with a Neolithic Age culture, neolithic meaning new stone for the ground stone tools, the axes and adzes, suited for clearing the land and working the soil to grow their food.
The Neolithic Age began some 12,000 years ago, originating independently in different centers around the world. For the island nations of South East Asia, it evolved along the Yangtzi River, the beginnings of agriculture and domesticated animals, of making pottery and weaving cloth, of hundreds of farm families living in a settled village where, unlike the thirty or so adults in a hunter-gatherer band, to function well as a community they needed more than direct face-to-face communication.
the Austronesian languages
From circa 3000 to 600 BCE, a seafaring Neolithic people, the Austronesians, sailing in outrigger boats, coming from south China, maybe Taiwan, arrived in the Indonesian islands, bringing with them a Neolithic Age cultural complex based on rice agriculture. They became the village folk of Indonesia from whom the later cultures arose. I discuss the Austronesians here in a blog post on Bali.
By 500 BCE, a Bronze Age culture had developed in Java, influenced by, possibly brought by, people from what is now the area of Vietnam. It was the Dong Son culture, a complex that included the skills for making bronze tools and weapons (iron came later) and for more complex and productive agricultural practices, all of which increased the food supply, population growth and social complexity. The number and the size of villages in Java increased. Chieftainships developed as the beginnings of government. There was trade and warfare. By the 8th century kings and kingdoms were flourishing. The wooden slit drum, having arrived with the Austronesian Neolithic, continued as a means of communication within the village and between villages but the bronze gong eventually replaced it as a musical instrument.
I wondered how a man (ordinarily, woodworkers are male) using a polished stone axe or adze or chisel could carve a slit drum, or anything, from wood and discovered a rich literature on these tools from archeologists and hobbyists who are knappers.
Neolithic adze
Neolithic stone axe with handle
Further reading on Neolithic tools informed me on … “Wood began its broad role in human life with the ground and polished tools of the Neolithic. Home and fire and furniture and utensils, cradle and coffin were products of the ax, adz, and chisel, which could fashion wood intricately and with precision. This kit of tools turned wood into an almost universal building material, for a host of new things was now possible, such as dugout canoes, paddles and framing for hide-covered boats, sledges, skis, wooden platters and ladles, as well as other household gear. “ Here for a description of stone tools. And here for an excellent article from archeology on Neolithic tools
It does not surprise me that in Bali the slit drum announcing a community meeting, wedding, funeral, an emergency is simple in form but beautifully and elaborately housed. Each village community, the banjar, has its own slit-drum, the kulkul, that is kept hanging under the roof of a small but ornate wooden pavilion, a bale, called the bale kulkul, In a temple complex the bale kulkkul is larger and far more elaborate. In striking the temple wooden kulkul one is calling upon the gods. For calling the demons, one strikes a bamboo kulkul.
The bamboo slit drum would have been a related instrument and present in Austronesian culture. In the Philippines it is called kagul, used as a percussion instrument for social dances and in the rice fields to scare away birds competing for the harvest seeds.
Returning to the anomaly of Indonesia’s Austronesian Neolithic Age slit drum being featured in articles on Melanesia’s small island republic, Vanuato, we turn to archeology and population genetics for information on the cultural and racial history of the islands. Quoting Samir S. Patel, here — “Analysis of seven 3,000-year-old skulls from the oldest cemetery in the South Pacific, on Efate, an island in Vanuatu, is helping explain how the region was settled. The people of this island nation today resemble Melanesians—natives of Australia and New Guinea—more than Polynesians, such as natives of New Zealand and Hawaii. Osteological data are showing that a people called the Lapita, who first colonized the Pacific, looked more like Polynesians. Melanesians apparently came later and the groups intermarried. In places such as Vanuatu and Fiji, Melanesian traits won out, while Polynesian ancestry dominated elsewhere, as people island-hopped to the east.” The Fiji islanders’ slit drum, the lali, horizontal and quite simple, seems close to the original Austronesian Neollithic slit drum.
In present day Papua New Guinea, hunter-gatherers arrived around 42,000 to 45,000 years ago. Around 7000 BC, they independently domesticated plants, taro providing the basic crop, and developed agriculture for settled village life. Around 500 BCE a migration of Austronesian-speaking peoples settled on the New Guinea coastal regions, introduced pottery, pigs, certain fishing techniques — and the slit drum. However, being of a Neolithic based on rice agriculture and this soil, climate, etc. not suitable for growing rice, the Austronesians did not increase in numbers. The region remained Melanesian. Later, in the 18th century traders brought the sweet potato to the islands, where it became an additional staple, increased the food supply and made possible a significant increase in population. This photo, possibly taken decades ago, is from a village outside a town, Buin, of men in their clubhouse, conveying coded messages by drum.
The Polynesian Austronesian culture originally included the slit drum, as pictured here in Samoa and Tahiti but in a form obviously elaborated after the introduction of iron and steel tools.
How fascinating this early technology for communicating within and between communities. One could continue with a history of how the slit drum in other lands, in Africa and elsewhere, held a community and communities together – but enough of that for now. Let me simply note how it worked in one part of the world in the beginnings of its history.
For other of my 1980s photographs taken in Indonesia —
Among them are those I took of Yogyakarta’s wonderful, colorful 1980 Eid al Fitr celebrations.
And a few years ago, thinking of Ravi, my husband, and looking through a family album he had put together, I found two of the 1980 photos of me in the historic Macassar, now called Ujung Pandang. I outline here the role Macassar played in European and Indonesian history and why it interested Ravi, then more of the city, plus photos of the Ujung Pandang medical school doctors and staff I was there to meet and who briefed me on the national rural health care program I was to evaluate.
Next, In “Visiting the Villages in Indonesia, Part I” I describe something of the project and include photos of a village and its people in South Sulawesi, intending to follow with blog posts on a cross-section of the villages I had visited. Instead, by having chosen a village in Bali, here, as the next one to describe, I got side-tracked; got lost in reading for background, in discovering Bali’s unique agricultural-community system, plus its art, and all that interspersed with reading into Island South East Asian history. Finally, eight blog posts later I woke up, realized I had researched enough, analyzed enough on how Bali became and continued to be, quoting Jawaharlal Nehru, a land like “the morning of the world,” and moved on from this project, interesting to me as it is, to write about my other interests.
Iris sans frontières 
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