Creole Objects and Techniques: Gold Mining, Gold Panning and Gold Working in Colonial Indonesia

Abstract

Museum exhibitions on gold tend to feature jewellery and other aesthetically valuable objects, whereas the extraction and processing of gold seldom play a central role. Bringing to the fore the technologies of gold mining, panning, working and trade, the article makes a case for the need to increase our understanding of items such as pans, chisels, lanterns and scales – in addition to the knowledge and skill involved in their use. Focusing on artifacts from the former Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), the paper documents a high degree of variety across this Southeast Asian archipelago. Rather than interpreting the history of gold technologies in terms of successive evolution and transfer, the authors emphasise locally specific solutions and contextually embedded technological complexes. Criticising traditional narratives in the history of technology, they show that indigenous Indonesian craftspersons continued to use their own tools, knowledge and skill well after Chinese and European exploiters had entered the scene. After the turn of the twentieth century, the local gold trade was characterised by hybrid solutions and the co-existence of technologies of different origin. The authors apply the concepts of “creole technology” and “trading zone” to analyse the sites where different technologies and groups interacted.

[gold, craft, history of technology, Indonesia, material culture]