The megaliths in East Malaysia II: stone urns from the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak
This note by Dato Tom Harrisson documents approximately twenty-five prehistoric stone urns found in two localities on the Southern Kelabit Plateau in northern interior Sarawak, based on photographs taken in 1946 during his military service.
The urns, carved from pale buff sandstone into long tubes up to nearly five feet high, were regarded by local Kelabit informants as the work of pre-Kelabit spirit ancestors. Harrisson records two sites: one near Pa Dali at 3,300 feet, associated with slab graves and later porcelain urns, and a second, more concentrated site about five hours’ walk downstream along a Baram headwater tributary, in a location now effectively lost to local knowledge. He notes that small tubular orange glass beads of probable “Middle Eastern” origin (post-800 A.D.) were found inside one urn, though these may have been inserted long after the urn’s manufacture, as re-use of ancient burial sites is recognised Kelabit practice (p. 105). Harrisson situates these urns within the broader Southeast Asian megalithic tradition, comparing them to finds in Sumba, central Celebes, Mindanao, and the Plain of Jars in Central Laos, and argues that the sites are unlikely to have been unique, having been lost under equatorial forest conditions and rendered obsolete by the introduction of ceramic burial jars from the coast (pp. 108–109).