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181 Revisiting the Rock Art at Gua Tambun, Perak, Malaysia Chapter 15 Revisiting the Rock Art at Gua Tambun, Perak, Malaysia Noel Hidalgo Tan and Stephen Chia Abstract Rock art is an archaeological phenomenon that occurs fairly frequently throughout Southeast Asia but is still not well understood. Such is the case for the rock art in Gua Tambun, a rock shelter containing a large collection of rock paintings in Perak, Malaysia. Despite its “discovery” in 1959, few detailed studies have been conducted due to the technical difficulties of recording and interpreting rock art, which have resulted in tenuous and disputable interpretations of the Tambun rock art. This paper presents the main findings of recent research on the rock art at Gua Tambun. Digital image recording and analysis enabled the quantification, reconstruction and re-interpretation of the rock art. Chemical analysis and replicative experiments, on the other hand, shed light on the raw materials and their method of production. The research also showed that there are much more paintings than earlier thought and a reconstruction of their relative positioning and chronology spark new interpretive insights on the rock art at Gua Tambun. Introduction Gua Tambun (Tambun Cave), named after a nearby town, is located just outside the city of Ipoh, the capital of Perak state in Peninsular Malaysia [Fig. 15.1]. It is the largest rock art site in Peninsular Malaysia, and is known for its complex array of polychromatic rock paintings of great size. Most of the paintings, in varying states of preservation, are located high above the cave floor at an elevation of 6–10m. The site is situated approximately 50m above the ground on a limestone formation known as Gunong Panjang (“The Long Mountain”). The site was “discovered” in 1959 by Lt. R.L. Rawlings, a British artillery officer stationed at a nearby army base; the site was excavated and subsequently reported in scholarly literature by John Matthews (1959, 1960) of the National Museum. Since then, little scholarly attention has been paid to the site. In the mid-1980s, a team from the National Museum conducted a study at the site to investigate the paintings and collected samples of haematite (Kam 1985) but there does not appear to have been any report published. Later, Paul Faulstich (1990) wrote a comparison of the so-called “x-ray deer” art from the site with other x-ray art styles from India and Australia. Matthews’ early reports (1959, 1960) continued to be cited as the primary source of information about the site although none of his speculations or interpretations had been thoroughly investigated (see Ipoi Datan 1998; Chen Zhao Fu 2001; Adi Haji Taha and Zulkifli Jafaar 2004). In the last 50 years since the “discovery” of Gua Tambun, it has also been protected as a heritage site, made more accessible by a dirt road and staircases, and opened to public, causing significant changes to the landscape. Because of the lack of knowledge about the rock art, as well as the observable deterioration to it by natural and human factors, it was timely to reinvestigate the rock art at Gua Tambun using modern recording methods and new theoretical approaches. In this paper, we present the key findings of the reinvestigation of the Gua Tambun rock paintings conducted in 2009. The main purpose of this research is to expand the current knowledge about the site, and more specifically, to conduct a detailed inventory and record of the rock art as basic information because the number of rock paintings reported were inconsistent: Matthews (1960: 1) suggested “more than 80”, while a brochure from the local heritage society stated a lesser number of between 20 and 30 181 Crossing Borders hi res combined181 181 8/23/2012 7:46:05 PM 182 Noel Hidalgo Tan and Stephen Chia (Yayasan Perak n.d.). We also wanted to test some of the existing assumptions about the rock art — such as the suggestion that the red, orange and purple paints were made from haematite (Matthews 1960: 1) — and to reexamine the identification of animal forms first suggested by Matthews (1959, 1960). Revisiting Gua Tambun was also timely because many of the methods and approaches used in this study were not available 50 years ago. Rock art research was a poorly-developed subfield of archaeology in 1959 and only a handful of sites were known to archaeologists then; the known sites included the Painted Cave at Niah (Harrisson 1959), Khao Khian in Southern Thailand (de Lajonquière 1912...

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