I am reading an old book I picked up - “Black Borneo” (published 1942), by a guy named Miller. It is his story of his expedition to the interior of the island, in 1939. He claims to have seen the ruins of a hindu temple, in a valley in the interior of the island. He also claims that there were human habitations in the interior, and that there is evidence of large lakes once existing there. he claims that the Dyak natives are the descendants of these people, though degenerate (they were at a stone age level of culture). Is there any evidence that this is true? there seems to be very little archaeology being done in Borneo.
In any event, does anybody know about this guy Miller?
I see there’s a couple of references to him as Charles ‘Cannibal’ Miller (instead of his real name Charles Constant Miller) and a wonderful potted biography here in the intro to his other book, Cannibal Caravan.
I’d take large pinches of salt with any ‘facts’ he volunteers about himself, or his discoveries.
Wiki backs up the claim of Hindu ruins.
Of course, the question is - how old? Are we talking relatively recent, the last 1000 years - or something from earlier times? Of course the Mayans never got beyond stone and copper age, but the collapse of their civilization (Climate change? War? Soil exhaustion?) was less than 500 years before the arrival of the Spaniards, and they were in more primitive conditions. A non-iron-age people would not have far to “fall” to go from a city-oriented, stone building civilization to a bunch of disorganized villages. A collapse of the food supply would guarantee there was not enough surplus food to create a large army to form empires, or large construction / elite class to construct the cities.
According to this article, the Dayak people may be descendants of the ancient Kutai kingdom, an Indianised kingdom of East Kalimantan, Borneo.
Historically, Indian culture and religion (Hinduism and Buddhism) was much more widespread in Southeast Asia than it is today, as shown in this map from wikipedia’s page on “Greater India”.
The Hindu religion declined in the Indonesia region with the spread of Islam and Christian missionary activity brought by Dutch colonialism, although there are still Hindu enclaves, such as the island of Bali and the Tenggerese people in Eastern Java. Malaysia also has a sizeable Hindu community (6.3% of population), although I’m not sure how many of these are in Malaysian Borneo. In any case, most Malaysian Hindus are apparently descended from migrant workers from Tamil Nadu, India who worked on the British rubber plantations.
So I’d wager Miller’s description of finding a Hindu temple is probably true. Wikipedia states that seven stone pillars have been found in Kutai with 4th century inscriptions in the Indian Pallava script reading: “A gift to the Brahmin priests”. So that provides evidence of the presence there of both Hindu culture and religion.
The book is very good. What i found fascinating was his descriptions of the Dyak people-they were animists-every tree, animal, stream had a ‘spirit"-some helpful , most harmful to humans. It was very hard to get them to work, if one of them saw a "ghost’ or an omen (a bird flying over them), that was felt to portend evil. It would be fun to read a modern account of the Dyaks and their beliefs.