Forts and fortifications in Wallacea

This volume documents a common phenomenon found throughout the islands of Wallacea, east of the Wallace Line in the Indonesian archipelago: the fortified hilltop settlement. Historically, fortified settlements have been a common built form across the archipelago. The great naturalist Alfred Wallace (1869), during his survey of the region between 1854 and 1862, and later Henry Forbes (1885) in the mid-1880s, made frequent references to these structures that were in wide use due to the continuing prevalence of hostilities across the region. In the century and more since these records however, the provenance and forms of these remarkable built structures have been largely overlooked by contemporary researchers, and many of these impressive structures are now subject to neglect and erosion, reclaimed by forest regrowth, or repurposed for contemporary construction needs. One possible reason for the scant research attention paid to fortified settlements is their low archaeological visibility and remoteness from contemporary settlements. The present volume seeks to redress this gap in the record by presenting a selection of research papers on the archaeology and ethnohistory of fortified settlements across the archipelagic region known as Wallacea, offering new perspectives on their origins and purpose, structural forms and defining features. Given the scale and extent of fortifications found in varying degrees of integrity across the island chains from Bali to Maluku and Sulawesi to West Papua, the current collection represents a preliminary set of findings and observations that can form the basis for further investigations and more sustained heritage considerations.