Oceania: Austronesian Peoples IV
By Hayun Liu - https://www.flickr.com/photos/cleverclaire1983/288049269/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69355457
Austronesian people have a deep history of body modification, including tattooing and dental modifications. While the areas that they live in don't preserve bodies and skin typically doesn't preserve at all, but with how common body art is, it had to have traveled with them from early in their history since not all areas had trade relations with the rest of the Austronesian world. The word tattoo is Austronesian in origin, from either the Tahitian or Samoan tātau, which means 'to tap'. The Indigenous Taiwanese used facial tattoos to indicate'maturity and skill in weaving and farming for women and skill in hunting and battle for men'. Among some groups, men receiving tattoos was based on 'head-hunting raids', or battles where warriors attempted to take as many heads as they could and the 'number and location of the tattoos, therefore, were indicative of a warrior's status and prowess'. Among the Māori, rather than tapping, tattoos are made by being 'carved into the skin using bone chisels (uhi)…[i]n addition to being pigmented, the skin was also left raised into ridges of swirling patterns'.
By Medium - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109171360
Blackening the teeth is also a common practice in Austronesia, including Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), though not in Polynesia, the part of Oceania populated in the second wave of expansion, including New Zealand, Samoa, Hawaii, Tuvalu, and Tonga and islands east of them. Tannin-rich dyes protected teeth from tooth decay as well as a 'common sentiment was that blackened teeth separated humans from animals'. In Bali, a common practice involves filing the canines of adolescents because 'protruding canines represent the animal-like nature of human beings', so it's undertaken to both 'sever ties with these animal instincts and show others that the individual is old enough to marry' and it is the 'final duty' of parents.
By Arian Zwegers - Tana Toraja, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24487664
The traditional religion of the Austronesian people is one that blends ancestral spirits, gods, and nature spirits into a 'complex animistic religion', where animism means a 'belief that places, objects, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essences…[and] perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and in some cases words—as being animated, having agency and free will'. While exact mythologies vary, these basic roots are shared, as well as shamanism, where a spiritual practitioner interacts 'with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world', and a belief in a spirit world. There is a lot of overlapping mythology and a shared belief in Mana, or 'a supernatural force that permeates the universe…a cultivation or possession of energy and power, rather than being a source of power. It is an intentional force'. With contact brought about through trade, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam spread into the Austronesian world to varying degrees and became blended with their traditional faiths.
By Rongorongo_B-v_Aruku-Kurenga Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34608081
There is very little indigenous writing prior to contact with other cultures that had writing systems and with only one exception, no indigenous writing systems are known. While there are pictograms and petroglyphs that have been found and can be used to communicate, they 'did not encode language'. The only known exception to the indigenous writing is from Rapa Nui with tablets known as rongorongo, which have not yet been deciphered. Some of the information that has been deciphered, relating to 'calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information'. It is made of 24 wooden objects and about 120 glyphs, some that were damaged before they were found in 1864 and are now spread through multiple museums and private collections with none remaining on Easter Island. According to oral tradition, only the ruling classes, who were killed or enslaved by Peruvian and Chilean slave raids in the early 1860s. Some researchers think the origin of this writing systems was the 'signing' of the 1770 Spanish Treaty of Annexation or from other European writings due to the first attestation being in the 1860s and the lack of antecedents in the archaeological evidence available, but if it is a truly indigenous Austronesian writing system, it would be 'one of the few independent inventions of writing in human history'.
Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/60920609/Lontara-font-Salapa#
In other cultures that did have trade relations with South India, many of them adapted Grantha and Pallava Brahmic scripts which happen to be abugidas, or 'segmental writing systems in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary, like a diacritical mark', beginning around the 4th century CE, based on stone inscriptions in Vietnam written in Cham, a Brahmic abugida used for Vietnam and Cambodia. Areas that converted to Islam used abjads, or vowel-less or nearly vowel-less writing systems, around the 14th century CE. The lack of vowels in abjads made them incapable of recording important information so they were often modified with diacritics for the sounds in Austronesian languages that aren't in or as important in Semitic languages.
