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Arms and armour

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Arms and armour

Arms and armour in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo constitute a material culture shaped by the intersection of indigenous technology, regional trade, and ecological constraint. The available archival record, while limited in breadth, reveals a tradition in which defensive implements such as shields were collected and catalogued by colonial-era museums, offensive technologies such as archery were governed by the botanical materials at hand, and certain weapon forms traced their origins to Indochinese rather than Indian cultural streams. Together, these records illuminate a region where the availability of specific plant species — palms, bamboos, grasses, and mangrove roots — determined not only what weapons could be made but how they were used, and where the movement of artefacts across political boundaries left traces in the archaeological and ethnographic record that scholars have sought to interpret for over a century.

Shields and Defensive Implements

The study of shields in the Malay Peninsula has a modest but distinct place in the Society’s literature. W. Linehan’s 1951 article, “Shields in the Perak Museum,” provides a survey of shield specimens held in the collection of the Perak Museum [1]. The piece, published in the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 104–113, describes the physical characteristics of the shields in the museum’s holdings, offering a typological account of defensive implements associated with the Perak region. The article’s significance lies in its documentation of a specific institutional collection at a time when such holdings were being systematically catalogued for scholarly use. The Perak Museum collection thus represents one node in a broader network of colonial-era museum acquisitions that preserved material evidence of indigenous martial culture, much of which had been displaced or lost through the processes of modernisation and the decline of traditional warfare in the region.

Archery: Material Constraints and Technological Determinism

The most substantial treatment of offensive arms in the Society’s literature is N. W. Simmonds’s 1959 survey, “Archery in South-east Asia and the Pacific,” which spans thirty-seven pages and constitutes one of the most systematic comparative studies of primitive archery published in the mid-twentieth century [2]. Simmonds, a botanist whose primary fieldwork in 1954–55 was botanical rather than ethnographic, applied a taxonomic rigour to the classification of bow and arrow technologies that distinguished his work from earlier, more culturally oriented accounts. His central argument is that the technology, distribution, and performance of archery in the region are fundamentally governed by the availability of monocotyledonous materials — palms, bamboos, and grasses — and that these material constraints explain both the geographic pattern of shooting techniques and the ceiling on accuracy achievable by primitive archers [2, pp. 67–104].

Simmonds organises the survey geographically, moving from Polynesia in the southeast to northeastern India in the northwest, describing under each heading the bow construction, arrow technology, and method of shooting [2]. The analytical thread is technological rather than cultural: the choice of bow stave, the form of the string, and the material of the arrow shaft are not independent variables but form an interlocking system that determines which hold can be used and what level of accuracy is possible [2]. The pinch hold, universal across Melanesia and the Pacific, is shown to be a direct consequence of the combination of strip strings and nockless grass shafts; the Mediterranean hold, which appears only in the Philippines, Malaya, and India, requires a firmly nocked arrow and is therefore dependent on access to bamboo or other materials that can be reliably nocked [2].

A second major argument concerns the absence of composite bows in the wet tropics. Simmonds reasons that sinew backing and animal glues cannot survive in a warm, humid climate, making the self-bow the only viable construction, which in turn limits the draw weight and efficiency achievable with locally available timbers [2]. The author also addresses the curious absence of chipped-stone arrowheads in the region, noting that the skill required to produce them is no greater than that needed for the elaborate carved points of New Guinea, and speculating that the absence may reflect local availability of suitable stone rather than any technological incapacity [2].

The evolutionary argument that closes the article holds that meaningful advances in shooting accuracy require the simultaneous achievement of several interrelated innovations — matched arrows, a constant draw, a well-placed anchor point, and efficient fletching — and that in many parts of the region, the local material environment forbids progress in one crucial detail, typically the nock, thereby blocking any general advance [2]. The Kukukuku of the New Guinea highlands are cited as a partial exception, having developed matched arrows and a standard draw, which may account for their reputation as formidable warriors [2].

Specific findings from the survey illustrate the range of variation within these constraints. Fijian bows, made exclusively from the aerial roots of Rhizophora and Haplopetalon mangroves, measured 130–180 cm and bore a characteristic pith groove that had been misinterpreted by earlier writers as a spare-arrow channel or backing-cord seat [2, pp. 67–68]. The New Guinea palm bow, constructed from Archontophoenix species and ranging from 150 to 220 cm in length, had an estimated service life of only about one thousand arrows, a short longevity attributed to the tangential splitting strains imposed by trimming the back of a skin-to-belly stave [2, pp. 71]. The Andaman S-shaped bow, over two metres long, was asymmetrical in both profile and longitudinal plane, with the tips of the two limbs twisted in contrary directions; it was the only bow of its kind known from the region [2, pp. 90–91]. In the Khasi Hills, a sporting bow of bamboo drew forty pounds at twenty-five inches, and eight hits out of ten was considered good shooting — roughly equivalent to eighty percent of shots in the black on a conventional European target at fifty yards [2, pp. 92–93]. The Santhal bow of north Bengal drew forty-one pounds at twenty-one inches and, when its draw curve was compared with four other bows, proved superior to two sporting lemonwood bows and roughly equal to a steel sporting bow [2, p. 94]. Field testing at Goroka in New Guinea revealed that local archers hit a notebook page at fifteen yards once in fifteen shots; one man missed a domestic fowl at three yards that he could not have caught with his hands [2, p. 78].

The article draws on specimens in the Fiji Museum, the Australian Museum (Sydney), the Indian Museum (Calcutta), the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford), the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (Cambridge), and the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), supplemented by field observations in New Guinea, the Khasi Hills, and Manipur [2, pp. 65]. Historiographically, the paper sits at the intersection of economic botany and material-culture studies, and its argument that material availability, rather than cultural choice, is the primary determinant of archery technique anticipates later work in technological determinism [2].

The Tulang Mawas and Indochinese Connections

A distinct line of inquiry concerns the origins of specific weapon forms in the Malay Peninsula. H. G. Quaritch Wales’s 1974 note, “The origin of the ‘tulang mawas’,” addresses a strangely shaped tool or weapon found in Malaya, arguing for an Indochinese rather than Indian origin [3]. The note was prompted by a recent find in the Raub district and supports Sieviking’s earlier conclusion that the Malayan Iron industry derived from Indochina rather than India [3, p. 110]. Wales notes that a tulang mawas said to have come from Indochina was once held in the Raffles Museum, providing a comparative specimen for the Malayan examples [3, p. 110].

Wales further links the tulang mawas to the Khmer phkak, a weapon prominent in twelfth-century Angkor bas-reliefs, and to a similar tool carried by Moi (Stieng) tribesmen as illustrated by Aymonier [3, p. 110]. His conclusion is that the phkak represents a prehistoric element of material culture that survived among the Khmers, while the tulang mawas entered Malayan Iron Age culture from Indochina and was later suppressed there by more thorough Indianisation [3, p. 110]. This argument positions the tulang mawas as a diagnostic artefact for tracing the direction and timing of cultural transmission between mainland Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula, and it reinforces the broader thesis that the material culture of the region’s Iron Age was shaped more by Indochinese than by Indian influences.

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on arms and armour reveals a progression from descriptive museum cataloguing to analytical, cross-regional comparison, and finally to targeted archaeological argument. Linehan’s 1951 article on Perak Museum shields represents the earlier phase: a straightforward documentation of institutional holdings, valuable for its preservation of physical detail but limited in interpretive ambition [1]. Simmonds’s 1959 survey marks a decisive shift in scale and method, applying the rigour of economic botany to a comparative study that spans from Polynesia to northeastern India and that engages explicitly with questions of technological causation [2]. The article’s emphasis on material constraint as the primary determinant of form and function represents a methodological departure from the cultural-historical approaches that had previously dominated the study of indigenous weapons in the region.

Quaritch Wales’s 1974 note, though brief, introduces a different analytical register: the use of a single diagnostic artefact type to argue for a specific direction of cultural transmission and to challenge the prevailing assumption of Indian primacy in the region’s Iron Age material culture [3]. The note’s reliance on comparative evidence from Angkor bas-reliefs, ethnographic illustration, and museum specimens illustrates the interdisciplinary character of the Society’s scholarship at this stage, drawing on art history, ethnography, and archaeology in concert.

The gaps in the record are notable. No article in the available set addresses firearms, edged weapons such as the keris or parang, or the armour and protective gear associated with the courts of the Malay sultanates. The absence of any treatment of the keris — arguably the most culturally significant weapon in the Malay world — is a conspicuous lacuna. The records that do exist focus on the periphery of the martial tradition: the shields of a provincial museum, the archery of non-state societies, and a single prehistoric tool type. Together, they suggest that the Society’s engagement with arms and armour has been shaped by the availability of museum specimens and the disciplinary interests of individual contributors, rather than by a sustained programme of research into the martial culture of the Malay Peninsula and Borneo as a whole.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. W. Linehan (1951). Shields in the Perak Museum JMBRAS 24(3): 104–113. Read on JSTOR
  2. N.W. Simmonds (1959). Archery in South-east Asia and the Pacific JMBRAS 32(1): 67–104. Read on JSTOR
  3. H.G.Q. Wales (1974). The origin of the “tulang mawas” JMBRAS 47(1): 110–111.