The Ancient Bones of Depok

 

Listen, I’m going to tell you about Depok, and you’re going to want to pay attention, because there’s something underneath that place—something older than memory, older than the Dutch who thought they owned it, older than the Christian plantation master Cornelis Chastelein who set up shop there in 1696 with his slaves and his God and his presumption that history started when white men arrived.

It didn’t, of course. It never does.

Depok became Jakarta’s youngest satellite city in 1981—a baby, really, in urban terms—and didn’t get its autonomous city status until 1999. During the New Order era (and if you know anything about Indonesia, those words should make your spine straighten just a little), it served as a pioneer for the National Housing Program. The University of Indonesia campus went up. The Jagorawi Toll Road cut through like a scar. Progress, they called it. Development.

But here’s the thing about building on old ground: sometimes you dig up more than you bargained for.

The colonial authorities knew this first. In 1914, a man named N.J. Krom compiled the Rapporten van den Oudheidkundige Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië—try saying that three times fast—and documented what they’d found in the Buitenzorg Residency, which is Bogor now, parts of which became Depok. In places called Onderdistrik Depok and Onderdistrik Cilodong, they discovered prehistoric stone tools and a roughly carved stone altar.

An altar.

Think about that. Think about hands—brown hands, not white—carving prayers into stone while Europe was still figuring out which end of a bronze sword to hold.

The Dutch catalogued the stone tools (inventory number 2075, if you’re keeping track) and shipped them off to the National Museum, where they probably gathered dust while more “important” artifacts—meaning stuff that proved European superiority—got the display cases with good lighting.

But the stones remembered. Stones always do.

After independence, when the city spread south from Jakarta like spilled ink, people started finding things. In 1967, the Institute of Archaeology and National Research began poking around Kelapa Dua in Cimanggis. By 1971, they were doing full-scale excavations along the Ciliwung River, and what they found would make any horror writer worth his salt sit up and take notice.

Pottery fragments. Stone bracelets. Precious beads that caught the light like eyes in the dark. Square adzes and their preforms—the rough drafts, if you will—proving that Kelapa Dua had been a prehistoric stone-tool workshop. We’re talking Neolithic agricultural period here, folks. Several thousand years before Christ was born, before Rome fell, before any of the history you learned in school even started, there were people here. Working. Living. Worshiping at that rough stone altar.

Dying.

The excavations spread. Pondok Cina in 1984, farther upstream along the Ciliwung. Bukit Sangkuriang and Bukit Kucong near Limo-Cinere, dug consecutively in 1976, 1977, and 1980. Intensive excavations, the researchers called them. Obsessive might be a better word. Because what they found was even more abundant, even more diverse, even more impossible to ignore.

Stone tools, yes. But also Chinese ceramics from the Song Dynasty in the thirteenth century, from the Qing Dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These sites had been inhabited for thousands of years—from prehistoric times right up until the early colonial period. An unbroken chain of human occupation stretching back into the mists of time.

So who were they? What did they want? What did they fear in the long tropical nights?

A researcher named Wanny Rahardjo proposed in his 1991 thesis that these people belonged to what he called the “Ciliwung Civilization.” They lived along the river—because people always live along rivers, don’t they?—and they had economic and social connections with communities downstream in Jakarta: Tanjung Barat, Kalibata, Kramat Jati. They made stone tools and traded them. They quarried raw stones for adze-making and distributed them to metal-producing areas like Pejaten and Condet.

They had an economy. A society. Culture. Religion.

They had lives that mattered.

And then Cornelis Chastelein showed up in 1696 with his slaves and his plantation and his Christian certainty, and if he ever wondered whose bones his workers might be disturbing when they broke ground, whose altars they were plowing under, whose ghosts might be watching from the darkness beyond the firelight—well, the historical record doesn’t say.

But I’ll tell you something about old places, about ground that’s been sacred for thousands of years: it doesn’t forget. It doesn’t forgive. And sometimes, late at night when the University students are cramming for exams and the toll road traffic has finally died down to nothing, you might feel it—that weight of all those centuries, all those lives, all those prayers carved into stone.

Depok remembers.

The stones remember.

And maybe—just maybe—they’re still watching.