The Megalithic Culture of Indonesia

Abstract

IN his presidential address to Section H (see NATURE, vol. lxxxvii., p. 356), at the meeting of the British Association at Portsmouth in 1911, Dr. Rivers explained how he had been led to reject the popular dogma of “spontaneous generation” in ethnology, which is wrongly claimed to be “evolution,” and to realise the vast importance in the development of civilisation of the influence exerted by the contact of peoples and the diffusion of culture. When he recognised that the germs of the megalitbic culture of Melanesia had been introduced from the west it was clear that the immediate problem for investigation was to determine whether the Malay Archipelago, the scattered islands of which convert the great waterway linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans into a sort of sieve, had preserved any records of the earliest of the cultural streams which must have been filtering through it for twenty-five centuries. He therefore recommended Mr. W. J. Perry (who had been sent by Dr. A. C. Haddon to seek his advice as to the choice of a subject for investigation in ethnology) to learn the Dutch language and to search the voluminous, though scattered, literature of Indonesian ethnology for any evidence of the easterly diffusion of megalithic culture.

The Megalithic Culture of Indonesia.

By W. J. Perry. Pp. xiii + 198. (Manchester: At the University Press; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1918.) Price 12s. 6d. net.